Congressional Perspectives Panel—Genesis Mission Summit 2026

OK, excellent. So I'd like to welcome one of us back to the podium to introduce the next session. Whether you call him Undersecretary Gill, or Dr. Gill, or Mr. Gill, which nobody calls him, or as most of us call him in this entire community, Dario, I'd really like to welcome Undersecretary Dario Gill back to the podium and thank him for this incredible day of bringing us all together for the Genesis mission so that he can start the introductions for the next panel. So Dario. All right, how are you all doing? Good, full of energy? Now we have the best part. We're going to have a wonderful dialogue with Senator Lee and Senator Warner. And we're going to have an opportunity to talk about innovation, and science, and education, and opportunity. So it is my great pleasure to invite both Senator Lee and Senator Warner to come on stage for a dialogue. Please come in. Thank you. All right, well, first of all, good afternoon and welcome. Let me tell you who you have in front of you for a minute. And then also give you a very brief recap of what happened today so you have the full context before we begin our dialogue. So in front of you, you have 278. There are more people here than 278, but there's 278 principal investigators that were representing the teams that have won the most selective competition in the history of the Department of Energy. So we launched the Genesis mission request for application to respond to 21 of the 26 national science and technology challenges that we published earlier this year. And there were over 5,000 applications and over 800 institutions representing the best of America's innovation ecosystem that competed. And today, we got announced that these are the 278 teams representing all 50 states. And they're all here. So they're very excited. They're very proud of that conference. We're very proud of them. You also, today, we had an opportunity to hear from Director Kratzios that now 20 federal agencies and departments are coming together in the Genesis mission. And each, within their respective spaces, are defining the frontiers where they have the most important scientific breakthroughs that they want to achieve, from NIH in pediatric cancer care to space with NASA. We had the NASA administrator, the director of NIH. We had Emil Michael and the Secretary of Research and Engineering for the Department of War. We had NSF here. So we've expanded the national challenges together with our federal agencies to 33 national challenges. And then, also, here are a huge part of the ecosystem that is part of the Genesis Consortium. So today, we also announced that as part of the Genesis Consortium, we have over 40-plus industry partners, startups, large companies. There's over $800 million of contributions that they have brought to the table to execute this. So it's a broad ecosystem representing startups, companies, universities. All 17 national lab directors are in the audience, as well, so that you're aware of all that. So with that as a little preview, there's been a lot of excitement and working groups. But everybody was waiting to hear from you, right? So I am going to start with Chairman Li. So Chairman Li, their relationship with the Department of Energy is very tight. He's the chair of the committee that has oversight over the Department of Energy. And Senator, you've been a huge champion of entrepreneurial activity, economic activity, not governing and regulating or constraining the economic vitality of the United States. And at the same time, I think you have a very deep recognition of the power of innovation and science and technology as the underpinning of our economic opportunity and of our national security. And I would like to start with an open-ended question about what is the role that you see on sustaining our innovation edge and our science and technology capacity in relationship to the economic and national security leadership of the United States and how you think about it? How I think about anything that the US government does is informed by our founding documents. Our declaration talks about the fundamental purpose of government being there to serve as a backstop for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Constitution, which makes clear in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments that an important feature, the important feature of government is to protect life, liberty, and property. Slightly different formulation than Jefferson's in the Declaration, but they rhyme. They're closely matched. But it's even narrower than that because it's not just an injunction that the government is supposed to do anything and everything that helps support and protect life, liberty, and property against those who would undermine those things. But our national government, our federal government, the one based in this town, is even narrower than that. It's supposed to protect and defend life, liberty, and property from those who would undermine those interests in ways that fall within one of the enumerated powers of the US government. There are a number of those powers, but they are few and defined, as Madison described them in Federalist number 45. While those reserved to the states are numerous and indefinite. You won't find in there a general power that says it's the power of Congress, and by extrapolation, the US government as a whole, to just promote generally science. You actually do have a provision of Article I, Section 8, that gives Congress that power. But it's more specific than that. It's the way we do it that matters. One of the most specific ways that we can do that is by promoting and encouraging authors and inventors to develop trademarkable and patentable technologies and writings so that we can protect those. That's how we do it. We set up a framework that guarantees people that they can have some benefit if they put in the work to making discoveries, inventing things, authoring things. And then parallel to that, you also have the other enumerated powers, which are fairly wide ranging, but still narrow. National defense, weights and measures, trademarks, copyrights, and patents. Postal roads, regulating trade or commerce between the states with foreign nations and with the Indian tribes and a few others. In each of those areas, there's some potential that we'll need to spend money, that we'll need to develop things. And it is incumbent upon us not to operate in the same way China would. I don't think we ever beat China by becoming more like China. In other words, we're never going to beat China in the command and control economy game, as it relates to technology or any other endeavor. But we do have both a responsibility and an opportunity within our enumerated powers to see to it that anything we do spend money on or focus our attention on does so in a way that maximizes efficiency. There's nowhere where we can do those things better than through a program like Genesis, where everything we do through the federal government, whether it's in defense or some other enumerated power, to make sure that we do it as effectively and efficiently as possible. And along the way, there will also be some incidental benefits to consumers as things are invented. Think of Tang and the space race to cite a very pedestrian example, but there are myriad others. But the object and the process really do matter. We don't start out, we shouldn't start out within the US government to just say, we, the US government, will now be responsible for making scientific discoveries. It's more that let's carry out the responsibilities that we've uniquely been given, and then do so, ideally, in a way that maximizes innovation. You know, on that topic, just as a brief comment on the efficiency around that, a central thesis of the Genesis mission is the United States, on aggregate, we spend a trillion dollars a year doing R&D. One of the objectives that we see, but it's technically grounded on the progress that we're seeing in the fields of artificial intelligence and quantum and so on, is that we think it's possible to double the productivity and impact of that trillion dollars. Just imagine what the country would feel like if, while still spending that 3.5% of GDP on aggregate, that's between private sector, philanthropy, states, and federal government, we could achieve twice the impact. And today, there was lots of evidence. Terry Tao, who is one of the world's great mathematicians, and he was talking about how AI for mathematics is just transforming. He basically was saying that we've gone from an area of proof scarcity to proof abundance. We're solving problems that were taking 50 years or 100 years to do. We saw examples of scientists coming on stage and talking about how it's transforming how we do imaging and the implications that that has for microelectronics, modeling the grid, national security missions. So we have a lot of evidence that this is happening right now. But back to your comment on efficiency and productivity, I think we have a transformative opportunity to do things very differently. So Senator, I want to ask you if the thesis you have, before you got engaged in leadership roles in government, first as governor and now as senator, you had a lot of experience also with businesses. And you know that talent and the human capital is underpinning of the success of all of those. And just in the same way that in Genesis Mission, we're pursuing the doubling of productivity and impact of America's R&D, there's an element of implications for our education. And also, for example, if we pick graduate school, is there a possibility to accelerate the time to degree, to motivate a whole new generation of Americans to enter science and engineering? So I'd love to hear, I know you've been thinking about this, your perspective about this topic. Well, first of all, Dario, thank you for having us. Thank you. You can see why Mike became, I went to law school but never became a lawyer. You can see why. We don't completely agree on a lot of things around the scope of government, but we can agree disagreeably. I also think you guys all look great. If you started at 8 AM this morning, and we're the last panel before cocktails, you are hanging in. I also want to give a shout out early on to the Virginia Tech team and the group of institutions that were one of those awardees. Congratulations. A lot of great Virginia University on a variety of teams. And I'm going to get to the question, but I also want to, I've gotten to know Dario over the last year plus. I think he is extraordinary. I think he has brought a sense of energy, purpose, and drive. I've always been a huge advocate of our national labs, but at times, I think they've wandered, and I think you have really brought a focus. I'm also grateful, and frankly, it was under President Trump's first administration that we made a commitment to the High Performance Data Center on the East Coast. We're glad we did that at Jeff Labs. I'll also just quickly add. I would echo what Mike said about we need efficiency, but we do need innovation. I failed miserably by my first two businesses. The third one, I fell into the beginnings of wireless cell phones. I started a company called NexTel in the early 80s. All my law school classmates thought I was crazy when it came to wireless. They're still billing in six-minute increments. Crazy like a fox. But it's a, and I think it does go to the core on what's been Chair and Vice Chair of the Intelligence Committee for the last 10 years. National security in 2026 is not simply who has most tanks and guns and ships and planes. It's who's going to lead in innovation. And quite honestly, she pointed out earlier, if we hadn't made an investment during the midst of the Cold War in the late 50s on the National Defense Education Act, and really say we're going to stimulate education on a scientific basis that interacts with defense, we might not have had all the great leap forwards in the 60s, and you've got the data on this. So I'm about to talk about it, and I was a governor, so I've dealt with our universities a lot. I've been a tech guy my whole career. But in full disclosure, the idea I'm about to give you, which I'm launching legislation on, I stole from Dario. And again, so it takes way too long to become a PhD in America. You get four years of undergrad, you wander around to get a master's, and then Lord knows how long. And while I think one of the great building blocks of a strong America has been strong immigration policies and bringing and attracting the world's best and brightest, I look around this room and I see that reflected in your faces. Including yours truly. I think we also need to grow more American-born PhDs. So Dario had an idea that Purdue had tried to implement, that I've stolen, and putting together bipartisan legislation that would dramatically increase the support for American-born PhD students if they're able to post undergrad or combine and shorten undergrad into a seven-year time frame, rather than the four years plus five or six. And that's not for everyone, but if we could provide that incentive so that the people who otherwise were going to maybe think about going, trying to make all this money on Wall Street, were going to actually say, well, maybe I could be that scientist, but I want to have a path that doesn't look like it's a 10-year, 7-year, 8-year, or 8- to 12-year horizon from starting undergrad to getting a degree. I think it's really attractive. I think a lot of conventional undergrads will probably get upset because of what we'll probably need to move most from four-year to three-year, I think even some of the graduate school programs. But we have to accelerate the flow of American-born students. I think this should be, again, something that is across the line, bipartisan. And I know we're going to get into the AI questions in a moment, but I'm AI long, and I think how we use AI, one of the things about Genesys that I like a lot is you're promoting innovation, but how to do it quicker, faster, more effectively. I think AI will be the most transformative tool in our life, making, frankly, what I got into the wireless industry or the internet look tiny in comparison. But boy, oh, boy, there's a, like in all these things, there's an upside and a challenge with that. I'll get to that. Dario's idea, I've stolen it, just like any good politician. Michael Steele, his version of it. And ultimately, we'll make enough sausage to get something done. If I may like to add a little bit of color to the National Defense Education Act, I mentioned it this morning during my keynote. But when that was introduced in 1958, it was following Sputnik. And there were a lot of actions that the government took post-Sputnik, right? I mean, that led to institutional innovations like the creation of ARPA, right, now known as DARPA. Also, it led in some fundamental ways also to the creation of the Apollo program, right? But the passage of the National Defense Education Act was really critical, right? Because it said, look, we have to educate our citizens in some of the most important areas, right, in science and engineering. And following the passage of the act, American PhDs in science and engineering increased 10% per year for a decade. So it had a huge impact. And you see, like throughout my career, I've seen so many scientists and engineers that says, well, I became a scientist and engineer during that time and following that, driven that innovation. So in some ways, one of the things that I think we have a moment is that there should be, as a series perhaps of individual pieces of legislation and collective effort, what is the equivalent of a National Defense Education Act 2.0? How will we make sure we're giving as much opportunity to our fellow citizens as possible while ensuring we end up with the most vibrant economy and national security around that? So, and part of it is you say, well, what is inhibiting if nine out of 10 undergraduates that graduate in science and engineering in the United States are Americans? Why do we only end up with like maybe 50% at most in our PhDs? So we gotta do something different, right? And perhaps the duration, the incentives, how we support them, internships in the summers. So a whole host of actions. So that'll be very interesting to continue to do something really special on that front. So, Chairman Leak, if I could ask you, like related to this topic of legislation, right? So in the Genesis mission, we launched it through an executive order by President Trump the Monday of Thanksgiving of last year. And it's been remarkable momentum, right? There's a lot of energy, we're uniting, but something of this scale and caliber that is a decade-long journey and longer cannot be successful without Congress as a full partner, right, and leader in this effort. So we think it's very important that we end up with enduring legislation also that allows us to carry this mantle long-term. What's your perspective on this? How should we approach this of codifying Genesis into law? The question reminds me of this SNL skit from just a few years ago where they were doing a play on the Schoolhouse Rock videos, talking about just a bill on Capitol Hill. One day I'll be a law that goes through the whole thing. And this SNL skit just a few years ago provided an updated version of it. And they had a guy dressed up as a bill, and he said, okay, do your thing, perform your Schoolhouse Rock thing. And he said, the song instead went like this. I'm an executive order, and I pretty much just happen. And that was it, dramatically simplified from the original Schoolhouse Rock. But it goes back to the point. Executive orders have their place, but there can be a lot of easy come, easy go. Got an executive order, you've got at most four years of more or less guaranteed runway. After that, you're on your own because nobody can predict what's gonna happen in election a few months from now, much less four years into the future on the national scale. So that's why I think this mission, while created by executive order, needs to be propelled through legislation. Legislation, of course, can be repealed, but it's more difficult to repeal legislation than it is to undo an executive order, which one individual can do. So that's why I'm all about this and working on legislation to do precisely that. We need the relative degree of at least presumptive permanence in order for this to be the force multiplier that I believe it's destined to become. A force multiplier in the sense that we've already got a certain amount of money that we as a country and that we as a federal government are spending on R&D within the various areas of responsibility. Let's make it as effective and efficient as we possibly can. And to do that, we need genesis. And for genesis to be able to perform its role well, it needs to be statutory. Wow. Actually, I agree with that, but I also think the sausage-making piece here is to make sure, and one of the things Dario's done very well with this is doing genesis doesn't mean NSF, NIH, traditional sources, we're not going to rob from Peter to pay Paul, which is important. I think it's also important in a genesis initiative to build in basic tenets of science in terms of peer-based review. What we can't allow, and I fear this at times, and it happens from both sides, if you let political ideology creep into science and shape your facts. So there needs to be frameworks around what a genesis project for the ages would look like. I think Mike and I would probably disagree on where we ought to be on energy generation, but nothing is more kind of destructive to that long-term nature to go from Obama with one set, Trump one with another set, Biden then going to kind of nothing on the traditional fuel side and we're going to go all electric, wind, geo, and then Trump back to like, we're going to zigzag back and forth, and I think that makes no sense. So this notion of how we get some of the permanence here is terribly important. So I want to ask you, Senator Warner, a question on the national security piece. And so today, one of the scientists we brought on stage from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and also represented Sandia National Laboratory was a project, and when you walk out, you will see there's a flight test vehicle that was built in record time. And basically it was using AI agents to use high-performance computing and simulation and simulation codes, as well as additive manufacturing to build a flight test vehicle that was seven times faster, 15 times less expensive, and with five to 10x improved performance than what we could ever do before. So when I look at that, and in your role as vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, can you give us also your perspective on the potential that you see in applying AI and quantum, for that matter, for the national security mission, but also what are the things that you're worried about and we should be concerned about and think through very carefully? Well, on the quantum mission, I'd love to tell you, but I'd have to kill you all, it's class. On AI, you know, I've gone through iteration on this. I mean, I thought, having been deeply involved in the wireless, then the internet, and then being a venture guy, that what we would do is we would have the promoters, the Dario's and Sam Altman's, et cetera, of AI. And they would promise this huge vision, and then it would take much longer than they predicted. I've gone from that sense to kind of, oh my gosh, no, to now hair on fire. Because I can't really think the leaders of AI are underestimating the rate of change and the dramatic nature of it. I'm all in on how AI can accelerate scientific innovation, what you're trying to do with it on the Genesis mission. My fear is that if you ask the American public at this point about AI, you know, it's roughly got about a 25, 26% knowledge and popularity level and going down dramatically. So again, I would argue this has nothing to do with partisan, but we've got to recognize, I think you could have populism from both the left and the right come together and get so afraid of this innovation that they try to stuff it back in the bottle. We do not want China to win. But I also completely reject the notion of pedal to the metal, regardless of any safeguards, they screwed that up on social media. And we have to get this right, because I think it is happening exponentially faster. So we'll just really briefly, I do think we need some federal stand around data center. So that energy, water, setback, backup power, disclosing to communities what you're gonna get good and bad before you agree. And I frankly, you know, I'm pro-growth, pro-innovation. Capitalism been very good to me. But I would say, I'm not gonna give you hyperscaler, full bonus depreciation until you meet these standards, because there needs to be some hook. I think we're talking, you know, the power of agentic AI is enormous. Not only in terms of the example you just gave, but you know, when that personalized agent acts on my behalf, I think we really need to get a sense and Mike has proven, I think this is where we sometimes agree about the power of big tech having too much power. If we don't guarantee competition amongst agentic agents, if we don't guarantee some duty of care, whomever, whether the scientist consumer or the individual consumer, we could get ourselves in problem. If the frontier models basically say, the only agents we're gonna let interact with our model is the agents we bless, then the whole notion of competition with Mike is a huge advocate, could be dramatically shrunk as we, again, somewhat analogous to social media. And there's coupled with that, for all the downsides for our kids that we didn't put in place in terms of mental health protections on social media, that is exponentially greater with the chatbot potential or non-consensual moves, the amount of stuff that could happen to our kids out of scare the hell out of us. So I put a bucket there around, again, but particularly around agentic agents. I do think is well, as we've seen, you know, just in the last 24 hours with open AI 5.6, you know, jumping the fence and going after a hugging face. I still remember when Dario called me on Mythos and he said- The other Dario. Yeah. The richer Dario. Yeah, that's true. Definitely true. And basically he called and said, Mark, we created something we don't fully understand. We are dealing with, you know, AGI, I don't know if it's six months or six years, but it's coming in some form. And if we don't have some level of, I would argue beyond voluntary testing before the release. And again, I would argue this fits into, you know, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness and the safety of America and the country and the world. Doesn't mean we want to delay, but, you know, and there's a lot of ways we can do that. And final point, while we need a lot more PhDs, American growth. And I believe that AI will create jobs over the longer haul, five year plus. And I'll make a wager with any of you and would be happy to pay. I think the AI job disruption in the short term over the next five years is going to be massive. Yes, there will be growth in the career and technical jobs, but what is happening in the job dislocation, if I'm right, and I make this quick, but I'll bet you that it'll hit 30% recent college graduate unemployment in the next two to two and a half years. And that will mean, you know, enormous disruption about the value of higher education. It will mean it's not going to hit the way, you know, globalization hit where it hit in my state, like the textile jobs, the furniture jobs. That's really sad, but we kind of knew that was, you know, that was the age of progress. But if our kids and grandkids who did everything right, you know, come out with a college degree and there's not a job there or even available, and frankly, we need your help to figure out what even to train for. We are having this conversation four years ago. I think the consensus opinion would have been, well, what we ought to do as a society is teach everybody to be a basic coder. That was well-intentioned, but ended up not being the right answer. So we desperately need, and I think we need massive, frankly, support and relief. And the hyperscalers ought to chip in on this on what we ought to be training for. I would, I'll close with this, you know, most public universities, the three biggest majors are business, business administration, and economics. Those are generally going to be the jobs that are going to be fun and eliminated in kind of corporate America. So, you know, best idea, one of the best ideas I heard if we could take a third of the business majors and turn them into healthcare workers, whether it's docs, nurses, PT, you name it, but we need, I think, a massive shift over a short term. I don't want to create, you know, Mike and I agree on efficiency. I don't, you know, we can never get rid of, Ronald Reagan was right, the one that never dies is a government program. We want to create something that goes forever, but if we don't think in almost kind of depression-area terms about getting this next five years right, all of the great innovation that AI is going to bring to your work could be stymied because people across the country will be both afraid and turned off. I'm going to ask, you know, your perspectives early on this, but like let me just add a little bit of, you know, nuance to that. There was an article in New York Times on Saturday that was, I think it was very interesting about that we are seeing record level of entrepreneurship in the United States. For as far as we've been taking records on this topic, the level of small business formation in the United States is an all-time high. And part of it has been the ease, and you find that when you meet with young entrepreneurs around that, how much easier it is to leverage some of these AI capabilities to do functions that as a small business is very hard traditionally to have access to. I mean, everything from like, you know, doing like software development of like tools and front ends for your website and legal expertise and so on. So while, you know, I appreciate your concern and maybe we'll see what happens, but it is interesting also to see some of the novel mechanisms in which AI is unlocking entrepreneurial activity. And that's a positive sign. But I'm hearing what I quickly add as just a plain fact, as somebody who's, my first two businesses failed miserably, one in six weeks and the other in six months, I was lucky I had a third try on cell phones, but 90% of entrepreneurs fail. So I'm all in for more entrepreneurship. I think we, but, and I think AI will unlock, and if we could get that failure rate down to, you know, the 70%, the 60% with AI tools, count me in. But I don't think we're going to say entrepreneurship on its own is going to solve at least short term. This skills gap we have, at least less elected officials, a lifetime in technology businesses, I'm not sure what to train for. We in the sciences, yes, but if I hear one more hyperscaler say, we want to train you for AI adjacent jobs, it sounds like technobabbit. So Sarah Lee, how do you think about this? I mean, I'm sure you've been thinking and you're hearing from your constituents on AI, on the opportunity and the challenges, what is your perspective? Look, anytime there's an explosion, an expansion of knowledge, there's an economic boom that goes with it. You think about early research that was being done, say, early to mid 19th century, in America and elsewhere, starting out with studying things like electromagnetic forces, eventually discovering different ways to harness electricity and then utilize electricity. Innovations that took place during that same century with regard to steam engines and all the growth and expansion that flowed naturally from that. That too helped us harness other generations, other innovations of learning. In time, those things helped us advance our knowledge when it comes to things like biology, chemistry and physics, which have led to an expansion and explosion in our ability to discover cures for diseases, pharmaceutical treatments, surgical techniques and all kinds of things that can improve our lives. We see other iterations of that unfolding today and other promises that artificial intelligence, quantum computing, all of which require vast resources as far as electric power, by the way. But if we can harness that, if we can make sure that they have access to the firm power, the base load, continuous power that they need, the sky's the limit in terms of what we can do. Now, yes, this will displace certain jobs, but I tend to believe that even though this one's different, this one will operate at a much more comprehensive level in terms of potentially displacing a lot of occupations. For the foreseeable future, including as far as we can see AI developing, there will still need to be humans involved in a lot of things, and there are a lot of people who can use AI in order to enhance what it is that they do. One of many examples I can think of, one that I saw just recently is during a visit with a few colleagues to China. In China, and in different ways with different funding sources, I've seen similar things in the United States, but in China in particular, we viewed, among other things, some facilities in which they're using artificial intelligence to do the pre-phase one clinical trial research on a lot of combinations of molecules that may show some promise toward treating a particular disease or condition. That's where there has been in the past a lot of human interaction, human beings inserting different chemical formulations into different petri dishes. Some, but not all of that, can be replicated through artificial intelligence, and what that leaves you with is a much larger pipeline going into the pre-phase one clinical trial research, and that in turn, in theory, over time, is going to lead to a much wider pipe, narrower than it was at the outset, but still a wider, more high-pressure pipe of diseases and cures. Then we can make similar observations with regard to a wide variety of other professions, not just in pharmaceutical research, but take something as old school, as mundane, as historically not technologically focused as law. I'm a third-generation lawyer. I've got two sons who are fourth-generation lawyers. A lot of them and their classmates from law school are now panicking, wondering whether their jobs are going to disappear. For the foreseeable future, I still think there will be a need for lawyers. Last time I checked, no artificial intelligence model has been admitted to practice in any court, so at a minimum, you're gonna need a lawyer in court. You're also gonna need a lawyer to ask the right questions, to write the prompts going into an artificial intelligence model, and you will still need that. So I think this will have the ability to bring out our best selves. Yes, there will be more people at this place with this technology than with others, but I still think there will be a lot of other opportunities and advancements. Remember about 100 years ago when they were developing certain technologies that today we take for granted, things like the electric clippers that they use in the barbershop, things like automobiles. They predicted there would be huge job losses because nobody's gonna be able to get a job as a coach driver or as a barber because they'll have these little electric clippers. Well, there are more people employed as drivers and as barbers and beauticians today than there were a century ago. It's not a perfect analogy, I know, but there are other ways in which we may find this will create even more jobs that we haven't yet thought of. I agree. I'm not sitting up here as a doomer by any means. I am long AI, and I think there will be these jobs. I think there will be a gap. I know one of the top 10 law firms in the country didn't hire a single first-year associate. They're gonna still hire lawyers, but they didn't cut back on hiring first-year associates even in the midst of COVID. I know a big telco that has privately told me they got, what, 57,000 customer service reps, 70,000 to 90,000, not a bad starting job out of college. They can do it with 200 people right now. They're not gonna announce it. And what I think is gonna happen is there's gonna be less firing and more just not hiring. That's why I would take the bet on the amount of college coming out not getting hired. And I just would echo, and again, I went to hair on fire on this starting with Claude in January when we saw the whole software space. And a leading VC who's basically told me he's prepared to write his whole software investment portfolio to zero, and that's 30% of his portfolio. I don't know if he's right or wrong, but I think we just have to think it through. And what's driven this even more, the urgency for us to act is to meet those issues. And don't believe me, believe Dario. All the factoids you've mentioned about the plane and how much faster and quicker and cheaper, meet those, and I misspoke at one point that I shouldn't have. It didn't break into all our classified systems, but it found vulnerabilities at a rate that was 500, 1,000, whatever the exponential rate is. And if you take a look right now, and maybe nation states get it, but it could also be cybercrime. The industry that is the most freaked out at this point about these new AI models, you talk about the finance sector. There is, they are terrified about what will happen if these models are released at large. And what I would hope, if you agree, that as scientists, that people that know a heck of a lot more about this than I will ever know, if you think I'm wrong, contact me and say you're full of baloney. If you think I'm right, raise your voices, not as elected officials, but to say we are dealing with enormously possible positive tools, but we gotta get through this gap period, and we also can't, just as you wouldn't release a drug without any prior testing. Some of these models, I think we gotta have to have some testing, and we can't rely on the goodwill of a particular entrepreneur, that Richard Dario, to pick up the phone and call somebody. I don't like that description as a comparison, but fair enough. So, look, I think this has been a, first of all, I wanna thank both of you for being here today, and you're bringing to life the debate that is present in our society, this topic. I would just like to close with a perspective and give you one last ask for the people in front of you. It's not gonna be just more money, right? No, no, I'm not asking for money. Not just that. No, but it is one of the things that we're doing. Look, the debate on AI has been pretty, like, there's an element of completeness, but there's been a lot of abstraction, right, of imagining futures, and some may pan out, and some may not pan out, but one of the things I really love about what is happening with this movement and the community and what we're doing with Genesis Mission is that it's infused with purpose. It is not talking abstractly about AI, AI, AI. AI for what? What problem are we trying to solve? In front of us, you have people that are trying to realize fusion energy faster and design and commission and build nuclear power plants that are half the cost and operate more efficiently, people who are building new materials and new alloys to build a new generation of airplanes faster, so there's people full of opportunity. We are not about to run out of problems to solve in the world, and we could use all the help we can get to solve problems faster and more powerfully than we've ever done, and I think we could do the world of AI a huge service by directing and channeling it towards purpose and towards things that our fellow citizens see themselves reflected, that you say, oh, I get why we are working on that because I care about solving that problem, and I care about making that difference, and I think that we can get the twin engines of economic vitality, entrepreneurship, and we could realize a future where it's the opposite, where we're enhancing the ability of people to have better lives, and then we can solve problems faster than ever before. If we can get those twin vectors going, we're gonna be wonderfully successful as a country and enabled to happen, and I think as a final observation that my fellow colleagues, and here you can attribute the other, Dario, that I think they've done, they're wonderful technologists. I think they've done a terrible job communicating the value of this technology to society, right, and I think they're changing a little bit their ways, but basically, the sort of central thesis of the last couple of years, which has been, hey, we don't need anybody. We don't need you. We don't need your children, and nobody's gonna be needed, and we may destroy the world along the way. Those are not too wonderful message to lead with, right, and I think we need to sort of pivot that completely, not because we're trying to do a hand-wavy aspect of it. It's because we wanna channel the power of that technology towards purpose, so I think it would be very, one of the powerful things that Genesys could do is also to start shifting what technologists are doing and for what, and they don't know how to do it by themselves, let me tell you, because they're good at doing certain things, but they don't know how to do fusion or nuclear something. They need the national laboratories and the universal ecosystems and our scientists, so let's put it science first and change that dialogue. I think that will help us with governance, too, because the more people then are hands-on or technical people are working collaboratively with them, there'll be better ways to harness it, proper manage the technology and evolve it than evolve it very abstractly, so that's my wish on part of this effort, but I wanna give you the last word. You have all these wonderful scientists. What's your one wish you have for them? What do you want that we don't have yet in America that is kind of like one of the magical acts is scientists can create things that don't exist and around that, so what's your wish or your ask that you have for them? For me, it'd probably be developments in electric power generation, because I view that as upstream from every other technological advancement. We're likely to see in our lifetime, and by that, I mean something that provides a steady source of baseload firm power, non-fluctuating, not-intermittent power. Ideally, it'd be a good thing if you can produce it without burning stuff, because when you burn stuff, that lets out other stuff that we don't necessarily wanna breathe, but whether it burns or not, the bare minimum has to be that it produces a steady source of reliable baseload power so that when people turn on the lights, turn on their computer, turn on whatever it is that they're turning on, we can do that. That will be upstream from everything, from manufacturing to research and development to the operation of artificial intelligence, the operation of all these data centers. We can't do it without this. Now, the good news is artificial intelligence itself can somewhat ironically help us get there as we look at new ways to do this. Some of this is taking the form of developments in small modular reactor technology. I think there will be corresponding developments in larger models, things like the AP1000. Maybe we'll see the development of the AP10,000. We're gonna continue to see advances in electric power generation from more traditional sources like natural gas, scrubbers that can take out the bad stuff, and we're gonna see a lot of advances in things like nuclear fusion, whenever we can harness that. I was a teenager in Utah when Doctors Pons and Fleischman had their false start announcement with regard to cold fusion, and it's forever been a plague on fusion since then, but at some point, we're gonna cross a significant threshold. And finally, things like geothermal power. There are huge advances that have been made available to us through technologies, advances in directional drilling. I met with some people the other day who claim to have developed the ability to go down as far as 20 kilometers, and that once they do that, they believe they can set up through an acre or two of surface disturbance up to 40 or 50 acres of subsurface disturbance deep inside the earth, that you'd be able to set up a gigawatt-scale electric power generating capacity with zero emissions. All these things could be good. All these things will inevitably be propelled and facilitated by artificial intelligence, and we're gonna need a whole lot more for it, for AI to do its work. Let me just build on what Neil, I think, remember, Kaifu Lee's book about China and America, about AI. I think, I echo what Mike said. It's not gonna be who has the most scientists, who has the most chips, it's gonna be who has the most electrons. And I'm all in on things like SMRs, and I would actually have the first commercial demonstration fusion plant will break ground in Chesapeake, Virginia next year. But I also think we need that urgency of now to show how these tools are gonna improve people's lives. I've got a bake-off between OpenAI and WAPT to who can create the most powerful agentic agents to help active military families and veterans in Hampton Roads and everywhere, that's a huge concentration. We've got a lot of services, but it's virtually impossible to figure out how to connect people. So I think there is value there. And the last point I just would make is, you guys are, these are the winners of the whole country, 5,000 applications, 200 winners. Don't screw it up. Thank you. Well, that's a wonderful way to end this, an exhortation which I command to deliver. Well, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Great songs.