HYPER-EXPONENTIAL BREAKTHROUGHS

TLDR: I just sat down with Michael Kratsios, the White House Science Advisor and head of OSTP, to talk about how we 10x, potentially 100x, breakthroughs in science. We covered autonomous labs running experiments 24/7, golden tickets for radical ideas, five-year grants that let scientists actually work instead of writing proposals, and a vision for American science that goes from the Model T to the Starship in a decade. The two reports, the Genesis Mission and the Golden Age of Science, are the most ambitious science policy documents I’ve read from the government in my lifetime.

Ray Kurzweil predicts we’ll see as much progress in the next decade as we saw in the last century. That’s going from the Ford Model T to the Starship in ten years. On top of that, we’re on the edge of AGI, maybe in three years, and ASI not long after. So when I sat down with Michael Kratsios, the Science Advisor to the White House and the head of OSTP, I wanted to know: how does the government keep up with that?

“We should be aiming for 10x, not 2x. With what’s happened in AI even over the last six months, we’ve got to aim big.”

The Golden Age of Science report he handed me read like a kid in a candy store. I’ve spent 30 years in the incentive-prize world, and this document went further than I expected. It names specific mechanisms, it questions sacred cows, and it proposes ideas I never thought I’d see in a government document.

AUTONOMOUS LABS: SCIENCE AT MACHINE SPEED

Here’s the line from the report that stopped me: AI proposes the hypothesis, robots run the experiment, the model reads the results and designs the next one. 24/7, no humans in the loop. Closed-loop science at machine speed.

This is happening right now. Lila Sciences, a company I’ve been close to, just closed their B round and is building out a million square feet of robotic, automated lab space. Their scientific superintelligence performs ahead of anything else in the field. Geoffrey Von Maltzahn (CEO, Lila) said he wants to be for Genesis what Elon is for NASA. That’s the scale of ambition we’re talking about.

“Imagine going online, putting a hypothesis in, and hitting go. Then starting on the next one without needing to wait.”

Kratsios’ vision goes further. He wants to retrofit this capability into the national labs, so a high school kid in Ohio can submit a hypothesis online, hit go, and have an autonomous lab at a federal facility run the experiment. No gatekeepers. No waiting for a professor to return your email. Just science. That democratization of access to cutting-edge infrastructure is the piece that changes everything.

BACKING YOUNG SCIENTISTS WITH CRAZY IDEAS

The Golden Age report identifies a problem I’ve screamed about for years: young talent waits too long before they’re given a chance. The median age of an intramural NIH scientist is 71. Seventy-one. The average age of a Nobel laureate’s prize-winning work is in their 20s. We’ve built a system where the people most likely to make breakthroughs spend their peak creative years writing grant proposals for people three times their age to evaluate.

Michael’s answer is a combination of mechanisms that sound like they came from an XPRIZE design session, not a government report.

• Five-year grants funded on day one. Stop making scientists write their next grant before they finish their current one.

• Fast grants, a few pages, reviewed in under a month. Tyler Cowen proved this works during COVID. Decisions in hours, not months.

• Golden tickets. Each reviewer on a merit panel gets one to three tickets they can use to unilaterally fund a radical idea, even if the rest of the committee thinks it’s crazy. This incentivizes bolder proposals and brings better people onto review panels.

• Incentive prizes and advanced market commitments. Pay for results, not proposals. The report cites the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE, which I personally love for obvious reasons. Michael said the government could absolutely put up $100 million prizes for grand challenges.

The report also describes a vision that made my jaw drop: prediction markets, crowdsourced AI agents, and DAOs funding scientific research directly. Imagine a marketplace where funders post bounties for breakthroughs, AI agents identify promising leads, hire autonomous labs, and verify cryptographically signed results. Smart contracts release payments as milestones are met. The system operates continuously at machine speed. That’s a government document describing a complete AI-native reimagining of the scientific process. I can’t believe he actually wrote it down.

SPEED, AGILITY, AND THE 10X MINDSET

The Golden Age report names six national technology missions: AI, quantum, commercial fusion, lunar exploration, robotics, and next-generation semiconductors. Each one matters. We’re going back to the Moon in 2028, building a lunar base by 2030, putting a nuclear reactor in space by 2028. A scientifically relevant quantum computer by the end of the term. These are Apollo-scale commitments, and they’re the kind of north stars that make young people want to go into science in the first place.

What impressed me most was the intellectual honesty of my conversation with Kratsios. The report admits that scientific productivity has been declining despite larger budgets. The NIH budget has ballooned to $45 billion, yet drug costs are higher than ever. The conclusion: we’re doing the same thing over and over, pouring more money into a broken process, and expecting different results. Forty-five percent of a researcher’s time goes to administrative work, not science. These are the crown jewels of our country, and we’re making them fill out paperwork.

“The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. So where are we experimenting with crazy ideas?”

WHAT’S MISSING

I told Michael two things were conspicuously absent from the report. First, longevity. If you want to impact the US economy more than anything else, tackle aging. The average American lives to 79 but their health expectancy is 63. That’s 16 years of poor health. Give people an extra decade of productive, healthy life and you transform everything: GDP, healthcare costs, Social Security, human flourishing. Michael agreed it should have been there and said we should work together on it.

Second, biotech as a named mission. It’s nested under Genesis, and $5 billion in Genesis grants were announced just last week, many in biotech. But biotech deserves its own pole. Dario Amodei says we could double the human lifespan in 5 to 10 years. Demis Hassabis says we’ll cure all diseases within a decade. When the people running the frontier say that, you listen.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

If you’re an entrepreneur: The government is actively looking to fund radical science through prizes, fast grants, and golden tickets. If you have a crazy idea, the barrier to entry just dropped. Start filing.

If you’re an executive: The autonomous lab revolution means R&D cycles compress from years to weeks. Companies that integrate AI-driven experimentation first will out-discover competitors who still run science the 1960 way.

If you’re an investor: The Golden Age report effectively describes a new asset class: science infrastructure. Autonomous labs, AI agents running experiments, and the companies building the picks and shovels for machine-speed discovery.

If you’re a student: The system is being rebuilt around you. Five-year grants, golden tickets for radical ideas, and access to national lab equipment from your laptop. The path from idea to experiment is about to collapse to zero.

If you’re a parent: Your kids will have access to scientific infrastructure that didn’t exist when you were in school. A high schooler will be able to run experiments on national lab equipment. Encourage the crazy questions.

To a future of abundance,

Peter