Response to the American Science Acceleration Project RFI
This post contains IAPS’s response to the Request for Information from Senators Heinrich and Rounds as part of the American Science Acceleration Project (ASAP), a national initiative to accelerate the pace of American technical innovation. This comment highlights strategies to ensure advanced AI systems are effectively applied to frontier scientific research.
Executive Summary
Advanced AI tools have the potential to usher in a new era of scientific discovery and economic prosperity, leading to a ‘Golden Age of Innovation’. However, one barrier to realizing this vision is that the current reliability of AI systems makes them inconsistently useful for scientific tasks – current AI systems remain plagued by flaws that produce unpredictable failures.
This comment focuses on strategies for ensuring that advanced AI systems can be effectively leveraged for cutting-edge scientific research. IAPS argues that AI reliability itself should be an important part of the AI R&D process to enable AI’s effective and reliable use for scientific discovery. Furthermore, innovations in AI reliability, security, and safety will make American AI platforms more competitive than foreign alternatives, thus making American AI the default choice for future scientific innovation. This comment outlines the key foundational advancements in AI-enabled scientific tools and agents that enable effective work, as well as two mechanisms for promoting accelerated R&D towards these foundational innovations in AI for science.
We make three recommendations:
Invest in making American AI more transparent, reliable, and secure by focusing on priority AI R&D areas
Enable effective public-private collaboration by establishing an AI assurance and security R&D consortium
Empower a new generation of research talent with rapid grants aimed at the frontier of AI science