When the U.S. National Science Foundation began its X-Labs program in May, the agency said the higher-risk, higher-funded awards would create new kinds of partnerships that would confront urgent scientific and technological challenges. Now, the NSF is doubling down on the idea, with an announcement in October that charities, companies, and investment funds would provide X-Lab winners practical support such as laboratory space, software, shared equipment, and access to key data and expert guidance.
The help provided by these organizations, which the NSF is calling “consortium partners,” will not give them ownership stakes in the X-Labs projects. The addition of the consortium partners may help the initial winners—who will be announced later in November or December and who receive US $1.5 million for a 9-month planning phase—reach the aggressive targets needed to compete for much larger $50 million multi-year grants.
“It’s a way of telling X-Labs applicants you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, so you’re not spending half of your X-Labs money to go build or buy basic infrastructure,” says Matt Cimaglia, an investor in consortium partners Occam Foundry and Florida Quantum Center.
NSF X-Labs Focus on AI, Computing, and More
The NSF initially announced two focus areas for the X-Labs program: scientific instruments for sensing and imaging and photonic microchips for quantum systems. In September, the agency followed up with three additional areas in AI for physical devices, decoding biological sequences, and pushing the physical limits of computing.
The NSF requires potential X-Labs award recipients to eventually demonstrate autonomy: Leaders for projects must be focused on the work full-time, for example, and must be able to make hiring and spending decisions independently from any university or commercial owners. That agility sets X-Labs apart, along with the risk appetite.
Consortium partners saw the potential to provide infrastructure and operations support to allow X-Labs recipients to focus on research. “[We’re] very interested in the enabling structures of R&D,” says Joshua M. Greenberg, program director at the Sloan Foundation, one of the participating partners.
Greenberg says that the foundation has supported multiple focused research organizations, or FROs, already. FROs are independent entities in the same vein as what the X-Labs program hopes to create. Unlike university laboratories or larger tech companies, FROs are founded with a time-limited purpose of advancing research in a well-defined area. Because they start with a clean slate, FROs may lack the infrastructure that university or corporate research groups might inherit.
To address that lack of infrastructure, bioengineering service firm Ginkgo Bioworks, in Boston, is offering X-Lab winners up to $5 million worth of access to its “cloud lab,” says Jason Kelly, the firm’s CEO and founder. Ginkgo’s cloud lab can conduct complex and flexible laboratory work, and the company will also offer laboratory space and internal datasets that could be useful for training AI models. Kelly is enthusiastic about the potential for X-Labs, which he says have the potential to “pull platforms into existence” like the federal Human Genome Project once did, which enabled a lot of subsequent innovation.
As scientific and technology companies become more powerful, Kelly says, it’s natural that governments should revisit how to involve them in government-led science. “The scale of companies is not like it was in the Vannevar Bush era [in the 1940s],” he says, “so how should the United States leverage those [much larger, more capable] companies? It’s silly to leave them on the sidelines.” In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an influential report that helped shape the modern NSF and U.S. federal science funding. A July report by Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, offered the current administration’s vision for an update to the Bush report, including the role of X-Labs.
Arthur Daemmrich, an historian of U.S. technology policy at Arizona State University (ASU), says he welcomes the administration’s willingness to experiment with science funding. “The field had gotten very staid…this administration has a certain energy that I haven’t seen in past administrations.” He also points out that the X-Labs approach to scientific work is “like gig work for science,” so while it may work for some people and some problems, it may not work for others.
The contribution these larger projects make to society is also worth studying, says Zachary Pirtle, a former NASA program manager and now a colleague of Daemmrich’s at ASU, though it’s an open question just how to do so. “If you’re funding these amazing teams and you want them to benefit society you can’t just have engineers and scientists. Do you need to have economists on some of these teams? Or a variety of different social scientists?”
Academics Embrace X-Labs AI Model
Some academics are leaning into the X-Labs model. Nathalie Risso, an electrical engineer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, does applied research on automating mining equipment. Risso is applying under the AI for physical systems topic, aiming to test self-learning AI operation of heavy mining equipment.
“X-Labs lets us explore things that are bigger than we can do in a lab, or that we might have done in a mine, but they won’t let us use their concentrators because they cost so much,” she says. The costs of getting it right exceed a typical university grant and the cost of getting it wrong is more than any industry partner wants to risk.
These kinds of missed opportunities justify an X-Labs sized program, say supporters. A spokesperson for the Secunda Family Foundation, another X-labs consortium partner, says that AI is part of what makes the NSF’s approach so urgent. “AI and other new technologies are rapidly changing what scientists can attempt, but the infrastructure and institutions supporting research have to evolve with them.”
“Engineers should be excited about the fact that there are open and new opportunities for people with an entrepreneurial mindset,” Cimaglia says, “You don’t have to be part of a university.”
Greenberg agrees. “This is more like founding a new organization than pitching a specific research project.”
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