The Department of Energy looks to create science-specific AI models

The Department of Energy is gearing up to create a new class of science-specific, open-weight AI models in collaboration with industry as part of its recently launched Genesis Open Models Initiative. The agency is collecting information from interested organizations that want to partner on the project. Contributions are welcome throughout the development lifecycle — from the base, foundational systems to domain-specific datasets and fine-tuning expertise to shape adapted versions for particular applications. In an overview of the initiative, the department explained: “These Genesis models aim to provide researchers, national laboratories, industry partners, and the broader open science community with powerful, transparent, and extensible AI models that can be adapted to a wide range of scientific domains and use cases. By releasing models with open-weights, DOE seeks to galvanize the scientific and AI communities around shared infrastructure for science.” The agency said the first model in its new class, called Genesis-Science-1, is under development. U.S.-based open intelligence lab Arcee is working on the model alongside DOE scientists and other contributors. The Genesis Open Models Initiative is the newest branch to grow from the ever-expanding Genesis Mission. The core of the effort includes goals to combine the latest technological advancements to stand up supercomputers, launch a national platform and double the productivity of the country’s research-and-development budget.

Taxpayers felt a slowdown in the IRS’s processing of paper returns this filing season due in part to a reduction in experienced IT acquisition staff, according to a watchdog report released Monday. Despite a 19% year-over-year decrease in the number of paper returns it received, the tax agency processed 46% fewer individual paper returns and 80% fewer business paper returns over the same time period, the Government Accountability Office found. A March report from the watchdog predicted the delays, flagging that the agency’s “critical systems for processing and scanning paper tax documents would be unavailable at the start of the 2026 filing season and that IRS would rely on vendors to mitigate the issue.” Per IRS officials, the system to process individual paper returns was unavailable for the first six weeks of 2026, while the scanning system for business paper returns was out of commission for the entirety of the most recent filing season.

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