How Meta’s AI Models Are Powering the First Wave of Genesis Mission Projects

Meta AI Blog

Lawrence Berkeley Lab and four other Department of Energy facilities deployed Meta's SAM 3 and DINOv3 models as part of the Genesis Mission's SYNAPS-I project to automate image segmentation in scientific research. The system processes X-ray and neutron imaging data that previously required weeks of manual annotation, now delivering fully segmented 3D volumes in approximately 15 minutes on 300 A100 GPUs. This real-time analysis enables scientists to observe dynamic biological processes and material changes as experiments occur, rather than analyzing data months later.

Why it matters

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — one of the US Department of Energy's premier research laboratories, known for Nobel Prize-winning work in physics, chemistry, and materials science — operates some of the most advanced scientific facilities on the planet. Among them is the Advanced Light Source (ALS), a football field-sized facility that produces intensely bright beams of X-ray light, allowing researchers to study materials from the atomic and molecular scale all the way to plants. The ALS's instruments, known as beamlines, generate enormous quantities of data — and as recent facility upgrades have dramatically increased their resolution and speed, the volume of data has exploded beyond what scientists can keep up with.