HYPER-EXPONENTIAL BREAKTHROUGHS - by Peter H. Diamandis

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HYPER-EXPONENTIAL BREAKTHROUGHS

Peter H. Diamandis<br>Aug 10, 2026

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Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.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.<br>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?<br>“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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>“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.<br>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.<br>Michael’s answer is a combination of mechanisms that sound like they came from an XPRIZE design session, not a government report.<br>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.<br>SPEED, AGILITY, AND THE 10X MINDSET

The Golden Age report names six national technology missions: AI, quantum, commercial fusion, lunar exploration, robotics, and...