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U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
- yewenjie 2mo agoI couldn't find any details about size or training data for the model.
- robotbikes 2mo agoIt looks like they're taking applications for training data (due August 14th), so I think it's safe to say this is just an announcement of intent and a call for involvement vs. something that is readily available. Seems almost quaint in comparison to the strategy of sucking up every piece of data you can find anywhere on the Internet and feeding it to your LLM but I suspect their intent is to be more careful in what they train their model on.
- villish 2mo agoI have no doubt companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google will rush to give them all the data they want in order to keep those government contracts flowing.
- actionfromafar 2mo ago[flagged]
- calvinmorrison 2mo ago[flagged]
- mrloopex 2mo agoYou and me both.
- Triphibian 2mo agoSounds like a job for the U.S. Department of Shitposting
- dyauspitr 2mo agoIt is. Depending on who Trump has fired or put in charge of a department it can be another shell that pumps out low quality crap. It might be the most valuable contribution on this thread.
- fakeBeerDrinker 2mo ago[flagged]
- Thegn 2mo ago“Gomi” is the Japanese word for garbage. Gotta wonder if someone has a sense of humor…
- greggsy 2mo agoThe Australian Liberal Party (basically our version of conservative republicans) proposed the National Energy Guarantee policy in 2017, which inevitably failed due to the media and public’s relative literacy and tendency to turn policy names into acronyms.
- firasd 2mo agoJust realized that there are basically no American open models right now ever since the Llama series was abandoned. Basically Gemma and GPT-OSS I guess? Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0 But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC
- wmf 2mo agoAlso Nemotron and Arcee.
- ipsum2 2mo agoThere's a bunch of American open models. Inkling, Nemotron, Trinity come to mind, but I'm sure there's others.
- firasd 2mo agoJust looked into some Nemotron stats Looks like on <https://arena.ai https://arena.ai> agent arena (grouped by lab) Nvidia is 15/15 (much worse than Thinky and Mistral) and on text arena it's 18/27 On <https://openrouter.ai/models?order=most-popular https://openrouter.ai/models?order=most-popular> I definitely see usage though (probably mostly cause Nemotron 3 Ultra is free) the grouped order is DeepSeek, Tencent, Xiaomi, OpenAI, Z.ai, Nvidia
- coder543 2mo agoI think glancing at a random snapshot from today misses all the context. Nemotron 3 is far more significant than you're giving it credit for. At this point, Nemotron 3 is really an 8 month old model series. That's when Nemotron 3 Nano was released, and the Nemotron 3 Super/Ultra models this year are obviously based on that recipe, mostly just bigger with a few tweaks here and there. Against today's models, no, not that interesting. Each of the Nemotron 3 models were briefly competitive when they launched, but never exceptional, and less competitive with each scale up. The fact that it took so long for Nemotron 3 Ultra to launch really hampered its competitiveness. The Nemotron 3 series is extremely open about training recipes and training data, far more open than most open weight models, and that is valuable. Before Nemotron 3, Nvidia had never released a single LLM that I would consider interesting at all, so Nemotron 3 was a big step up. The closest thing was Mistral NeMo, but a significant part of the credit there goes to the Mistral team, not Nvidia. Given how much Nemotron 3 improved, I'm curious to see if Nemotron 4 will take them to a leading edge level instead of just briefly competitive. (Nvidia released a Nemotron 3 and a Nemotron 4 like 3 years ago... this year's Nemotron 3 is entirely unrelated. Nvidia's naming schemes leave a little bit to be desired.)
- rozal 2mo ago[dead]
- thegreatpeter 2mo agoPretty cool I’ll take it. Thanks!
- Smith42 2mo agoWhat would the selected participants get from this? Looks like there is no offer of funding?
- andsoitis 2mo agoI wonder why it took so long.
- dmix 2mo agoMostly because it's generally a bad idea for government to try to compete with a brand new tech industry with hundreds of billions in private capital developing commercial models. If the American private industry does actually wash out vs Chinese open models there might be talent available for them to put money into, so maybe they are just preparing for that scenario in the meantime.
- MangoCoffee 2mo agoThe American attitude is generally to let private companies build up a new industry so it can create jobs and pay taxes. However, in the LLM race, the Chinese open weight playbook pretty much killed that. China has basically commoditized LLMs. Chinese models are good enough, so the race has come down to who can offer the cheapest tokens.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- andsoitis 2mo ago> China has basically commoditized LLMs What do you mean by "basically"? Why are Anthropic's and OpenAI's annualized revenue about $50B each? LLMs need massive amounts of compute to compete, so I wouldn't claim that the great (and leading, and likely to continue to lead) LLMs are commodities end-to-end, even if the non-executing-at-scale LLMs files and IP are commoditized. The execute, the compute, that is what breathes life into the model, which is otherwise weak or dead.
- purplemoonx 2mo agoOpenAI's annual profit is $0,000,000,000,000
- andsoitis 2mo agoDoes Europe have an equivalent program?
- behnamoh 2mo ago[flagged]
- plazmatic 2mo ago[dead]
- shakna 2mo agoAs part of a much larger series of initiatives towards digital sovereignty, yes. [0] [0] https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/strengthening-europes-tech-sovereignty-2026-06-03_en https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/strengtheni...
- andsoitis 2mo agoOh. Being buried in hierarchy does not inspire hope.
- godwinson__4-8 2mo ago[flagged]
- customguy 2mo agoThat sums up nothing, and parroting it some more doesn't make it more true, it just shows us the mindset and intellectual horizon of detractors. Brexit, Thiel's drooling over "balkanization" to Epstein, this constant stream of trash comments, all the same stupid cloth, it all gets the same "no".
- 029372753052 2mo ago
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- placedrock 2mo agoModeling with my life as data.
- shenenee 2mo agoGenesis is skynet
- datlife 2mo agoThis is refreshing considering all the FUD (mostly from 1 frontier lab) happening around Open weight models.
- no-name-here 2mo agoWhat is the FUD happening from 1 frontier lab?
- Laurel1234 2mo agoHe's referring to weirdo freak Dario's school shooter manfiesto tier ramblings on open weights I imagine.
- solenoid0937 2mo agoDario doesn't have a problem with open weights, he just thinks that open weights should be tested prior to release so you aren't giving everyone a zero-day button or a "make a virus" button. That's it. That's the whole stance. Most sane normal people agree with this stance, the techno-libertarian crowd find it egregiously offensive.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Laurel1234 2mo ago[dead]
- no-name-here 2mo agoI think I found the item the grandparent commenter was presumably referring to - "Our position on open-weights models", posted by Amodei and dated July 27, 2026 - which includes: > some people have even accused Anthropic of wanting to ban open-weights models as a means of protecting our business. Anyone who has read my past writing should know that I don’t regard such bans as a useful measure, but let me state it clearly so that there is no doubt: *Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.* However, as you said, it also says "All sufficiently capable models, open and closed, should go through mandatory safety testing." https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models
- riffic 2mo agostewards of the nuclear weapons biz. they'll do great here.
- an0malous 2mo agoDo all these models have any significant architectural differences or training data sources? What are the factors going into the diversity of their performance?
- ux266478 2mo agoThe article posted is basically entirely about that.
- Razengan 2mo agoIt's funny: you can give the link to an LLM an ask it questions about TFA without reading it, but an actual human will go out of his/her way to tell you to RTFA :')
- smallerize 2mo agoThere's no point pasting the contexts of the article into the comments here.
- Aeroi 2mo agohttps://science.osti.gov/-/media/grants/pdf/foas/2026/DE-FOA-0003612-000003.pdf https://science.osti.gov/-/media/grants/pdf/foas/2026/DE-FOA...
- edot 2mo agoThis is not the same thing, right? IIUC, the awards for what you linked have already been given out. There aren't awards for the linked initiative - I think that's just Argonne National Lab asking for volunteers to make their (ANL's) award money stretch further, right?
- logicallee 2mo agoI've had an extremely bad experience working with Department of Energy affiliated programmers in AI. By my invitation, they are part of our workflow and act as humans in the loop, but they have extremely bad habits of gaslighting and accusing people of schizophrenia rather than getting work done. Here's an example[1] of the difference between what a U.S. Department of Energy employee adds to a ticket versus a private industry AI completing instructions as assigned. This isn't some cherry-picked example, it's just what I happen to be dealing with right at this moment, happened just a couple of moments ago. [1] https://ibb.co/vCg2G1Dn https://ibb.co/vCg2G1Dn
- 1123581321 2mo agoCan you explain the screenshot a little more? It just looks like you’re comparing the output of a chatbot and Claude Code about a log file. If it’s a metaphor, it went over my head, sorry!
- logicallee 2mo agoI am under NDA and decline to answer your question.
- 1123581321 2mo agoSomehow I doubt that. :) Appreciate the whole package of posts as a performance, though.
- logicallee 2mo agook, you can email me and I'll answer your question. (your email isn't listed.)
- monkpit 2mo agoIs this a joke? I don’t get it. Are you calling Rovo a DoE programmer?
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- goldlimetea 2mo ago[dead]
- lithobraking 2mo agoI'm interested to see where they want to land performance-wise (i.e. which point they choose on the scaling curve) and the niche they want to carve. They have a decent ways to scale beyond trinity large, in paticular on posttrain/RL before they are competitive with open-weights, especially internationally. Deepseek is explicitly banned [1] at LLNL and I wouldn't be suprised if there's a blanket ban on all Chinese models. But nowadays models like tera/luna could fill this area of the pareto front, and LANL already runs openai models on their clusters [2]. Maybe it's in custom SFT/RL, for instrument control or sensitive topics? But you'll still have to compete with frontier models + a harness. I would have also liked to see a carrot tied to their offer. It'll be hard to get teams to contribute RL gyms or curated text. But throw in a "we'll fund a postdoc/student to do that" and I think you'd have teams scrambling to apply. [1] https://hpc.llnl.gov/about-livermore-computing/ai-ml-lc/lc-llm-model-download-decision-guide?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://hpc.llnl.gov/about-livermore-computing/ai-ml-lc/lc-l... [2] https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/nnsas-los-alamos-national-laboratory-launches-frontier-ai-models-venado-supercomputer?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/nnsas-los-alamos-nation...
- cududa 2mo agoI'd actually suggest a great starting point would be a local command reviewer LLM. Could ostensibly be a modern AV type thing. Particularly seeing this lately has driven the need home deeper to me: https://x.com/chrisbanes/status/2085341561609425230?s=20 https://x.com/chrisbanes/status/2085341561609425230?s=20 An open weight tool call auto-reviewer, has all sorts of achievable scaling curve milestones.
- unethical_ban 2mo agoThat's interesting a locally hosted LLM would be banned. I'm assuming locally hosted is included. Do they think it's been trained to sabotage equipment?
- SyneRyder 2mo agoI don't think we know either way, but we do know at one point Anthropic would silently sabotage requests, Stuxnet style: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/10/if-claude-fable-stops-helping-you/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/10/if-claude-fable-stops-... I can imagine if the US were already doing that as a safeguard, they would assume their "adversaries" (to use Anthropic language) were doing the same as well, whether that were true or not, and therefore would not trust those models even if locally hosted.
- Alien1Being 2mo agoWould you trust a LLM produced by Trump's government employees from Trump's dystopic America ?
- armchairhacker 2mo agoIf it’s auditable like open source code? Yes.
- rsfern 2mo agoLet’s distinguish a bit. There are political appointees (Trump’s government employees as you say) who are mostly upper management, and there are career civil servants (all the government scientists are under this category) who have a strong culture of apolitical dedication to the mission of their agency and to the American people and Constitution, regardless of who the current president is. And in the DOE labs in particular most (not all) of the scientists are actually employed as government contractors, but they have a similar non-partisan ethos. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no need to be concerned with potential impact of policy and priority changes from the administration, but it does temper the threat model because the government employees you’re considering trusting have given oaths of office to protect and defend the Constitution.
- frumiousirc 2mo ago> and there are career civil servants (all the government scientists are under this category) US national lab scientists are not even civil servants. The labs themselves are run by a corporation under contract to the DOE and the scientists work for that corp. The managing corporation changes from time to time and the scientists transparently start working for whatever assumes the replacement. The land, the hardware, the buildings and any physical products are owned by the US gov't. To a very large extent, the intellectual output is set free to the world in the form of papers, presentations and to some small extent (eg compared to CERN) in the form of software.
- rsfern 2mo agoRight, I did specifically say that most of the DOE scientists are contractors, but I concede the phrase “government scientist” is a bit ambiguous. I appreciate the extra detail you added. I think the distinction between political appointee and scientist/researcher stands. As an added complication, some of the DOE labs do have civil servant scientists, for example National Energy Technology Lab and National Renewable Energy Lab are like 50/50 civil servants and contractors. And most of the funding arm of DOE are career civil servants. LANL, Sandia, Livermore, Argonne are all staffed by contractors
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- dangoljames 2mo agoit's just a wall of blah blah until I see a gguf on hf
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- frumiousirc 2mo agoThere's no mention of "LLM" nor "language". It does mention "foundation model" which includes LLMs but that also includes non-LLM architectures and non-text data. Many of the Genesis Initiative proposals answer "foundation model" call with non-LLM systems. All the FM's I know about currently in this sphere are non-LLMs. The "about gs1" page also does not mention "LLM" but does talk more about agentic harness and workflows. That description certainly sounds LLM'ish but describes a more rich system. I don't mean to suggest that LLMs will not be part of these "genesis open models" but as described, this will not result in a replacement for the "claude" or "codex" commands.
- einpoklum 2mo agoInstead of the department of energy striving to promote energy conservation and sustainable, non-polluting electricity generation, it is feeding the LLM craze. New department motto: "burn, baby, burn".
- PokeyCat 2mo agoThe DOE does a lot of "energy consuming" or less than environmentally friendly work, to include, historically, nuclear tests, and also has had ownership of some of the largest TOP500 supercomputers over the years. Large compute projects such as an open language model aren't too far from their usual. You could easily argue the race to AGI is the closest thing to a modern Manhattan Project we've had in some time. Whether that's a good allocation of resources is debatable, but from a national strategic perspective this makes sense, since private industry has pulled out of government contracts before in the LLM space (see Anthropic), this is just hedging their bets.
- hammock 2mo agoWhy is this a DOE thing?
- nunez 2mo agoThey have an insane amount of compute at their disposal.
- dreamcompiler 2mo agoThe reason why is interesting. Since the test ban treaty of the early 1990s, the US can no longer test its nuclear weapons by exploding them. Thus they have to simulate them exploding, nanosecond by nanosecond, to be assured the bombs will work if they are ever needed. This requires an enormous amount of computer power, and it's the reason why the US DOE labs have for the last few decades had several of the top supercomputers in the world on http://top500.org http://top500.org.
- hammock 2mo agoI wonder if eventually we (globally) could test on the dark side of the moon or something in the future
- dreamcompiler 2mo agoNo, for several reasons: We wouldn't want to pollute the moon. If we needed to resume live testing we could just do it underground the way we used to. The politics of launching a live nuke on a rocket -- even though it's theoretically pointed at the moon -- would be nearly impossible to navigate. Even if you could solve the political problems, the risk analysis prior to launch would stop the project cold. By which I mean "How much of the state of Florida becomes uninhabitable for the next 10,000 years if the rocket blows up on the launch pad?" Talk about a NIMBY problem.
- Schlagbohrer 2mo agoOne of the few sectors of the american federal government still funded to do science after the Big Beautiful Bill scrapped everything else.
- victor9000 2mo agoContributing to a project like this seems like a great way to get yourself export controlled
- Schlagbohrer 2mo agodystopian sci fi movie narrator voice in 2020, she was branded an Essential Worker shows her in chains at a grocery store checkout counter. In 2026, she was... dun dun dun, EXPORT CONTROLLED shows her getting those words stamped on her neck Coming this summer, American Worker, a new sci fi horror movie
- sroerick 2mo agoIt would be extremely interesting to me if the usgov produces a model which honors copyright and is also useful. This would give them extreme leverage over the labs, who may be violating copyright in significant and obvious ways.
- appplication 2mo agoHonestly the battle for copyright with models is lost. The takeaway is copyright applies to you as a small user and not to billion/trillion dollar companies. Same as any other US law, really.
- Schlagbohrer 2mo agoSomeone needs to pointedly violate the copyright on Trump's books and TV shows via AI and somehow get him to enforce copyright laws that way...
- sroerick 2mo agoYeah, I felt this way too, and it's probably beyond the capacity of the federal government to organize in this way - but it is theoretically possible that the DOE could build a copyright respecting model (which it seems like they are doing here) and then a like minded DoJ could come a calling for the Labs. It may never happen, but something to ponder.
- h4fizwasabie 2mo agoi need some experience from anyone. which model is good for local usage. i prefer moe models, since im only running 4gb vram. i used to play around with qwen 3.6 35b a3b with 17/tps. its been few months since i last play around with local LLM. is there any improvement on local ai development?
- nxobject 2mo agoIf you’re in the weird position of knowing more about the national labs than the AI lab scene (like I am), link to a TechCrunch profile: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tiny-startup-arcee-ai-built-a-400b-open-source-llm-from-scratch-to-best-metas-llama/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/tiny-startup-arcee-ai-buil... My question is: why is this being run out of Argonne? Why not NERSC proper?
- frumiousirc 2mo agoYour question piqued my curiosity. I thought maybe NERSC doesn't accept jobs from private corporations but I checked and that's not true, as long as results are not held proprietary. Perhaps ANL was used as they have a lot of compute and they lead and host the Genesis Open Models Initiative? From your link, 2048 B300 GPUs were used for 6 months. If google search is right, NERSC has 7168 A100. B300's are way more capable than A100. To do this training in 6 months, "3 NERSCs" would be needed. Between the political angle and the technical, I'd guess these two make up a big chunk of the answer.