Stanford Leads 6 AI Projects to Solve Energy and Science Gaps

Scientists at Stanford and SLAC just got the green light to use artificial intelligence for solving some of humanity's biggest challenges, from recovering precious metals in old batteries to figuring out why the universe exists at all.

The Genesis Mission, a historic initiative from the U.S. Department of Energy, announced its first round of funding on July 22. Stanford and SLAC will lead six of these projects and contribute to 11 others, combining AI with supercomputing and advanced scientific tools to speed up breakthroughs.

One project tackles a problem hiding in millions of discarded phone and laptop batteries. Getting cobalt, nickel, and manganese back from dead lithium-ion batteries usually requires tons of chemicals and endless guesswork. Stanford researchers are building a team of AI agents that will learn from biochemistry, geology, and other fields to find better extraction methods.

Within nine months, they aim to recover these critical metals at 80% purity. Success could help secure America's supply of materials essential for clean energy and technology.

Another team is making plants smarter. Current methods for genetic programming in crops are painfully slow and often fail. Scientists are creating an AI foundation model trained on plant gene regulation, then testing it on sorghum, a crop used for biofuel and recovering minerals from soil.

The trained model will be released openly so researchers everywhere can design drought-resistant crops or plants that produce valuable chemicals. That matters for food security as climate change brings more extreme weather.

The Ripple Effect

Perhaps the most mind-bending project peers into the universe's biggest mystery. The early cosmos should have contained equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which annihilate each other on contact. Yet enough matter survived to create every galaxy, star, and person.

Stanford's AI system will help analyze data from DUNE, an international physics experiment searching for tiny differences between neutrinos and antineutrinos. The system combines reasoning capabilities with knowledge from vast scientific literature to test new theories against complex detector data.

"Key discoveries made here at Stanford underpin modern artificial intelligence," said David Studdert, vice provost and dean of research. "Thanks to the Genesis Mission's ambitious agenda, research teams here can continue to contribute to how this technology is refined and deployed to advance science."

SLAC Lab Director John Sarrao emphasized the lab's unique position with breakthrough facilities and unprecedented datasets. Dozens of researchers from multiple Stanford schools will serve as leaders or partners on the selected projects.

The Genesis Mission aims to double scientific productivity within a decade by uniting government, industry, academia, and philanthropy around shared challenges in energy, discovery, and national security.