Foresight Institute, which has supported research from nanotechnology to life extension since 1986, announces a leadership change: Allison Duettmann steps down as president and CEO after ten years to join the board, while co-founder Christine Peterson becomes interim president

Foresight Institute, which has supported research from nanotechnology to life extension since 1986, announces a leadership change: Allison Duettmann steps down as president and CEO after ten years to join the board, while co-founder Christine Peterson becomes interim president

The institute announced the transition on October 31: the board has begun searching for a new CEO. Allison Duettmann writes that the institute is “in its strongest shape in forty years” and says she will share her plans soon.

Among the achievements of the past ten years, the institute lists the Foresight Fellowship for early-career scientists and engineers, grants, and AI Nodes. These sites in San Francisco and Berlin reflect Duettmann’s conviction that open science needs open compute. According to the fortieth-anniversary report, grants awarded since 2023 total approximately $7 million.

Duettmann explained the rationale for the nodes in an August essay: five companies, including Amazon and Google, controlled 71% of global AI computing capacity at the end of 2025, according to estimates by Epoch AI analysts. Researchers who rent computing capacity send their data and queries through someone else’s hardware and depend on that provider’s pricing and access policies. In her assessment, open AI models that researchers can run on their own hardware have become capable enough that much scientific work using AI can now proceed without access to leading laboratories. Each node therefore provides projects with funding, workspace, and its own GPU cluster. She describes the nodes as a small prototype of open compute for science: according to the report, researchers at the nodes used computing resources over 90 days that would have cost $15–20 thousand in the cloud. The goal is a network of nodes, allowing work to move to another node if one is shut down or taken over.

The report opens with a letter signed by Christine Peterson as interim president and Duettmann as a board member. The letter recalls the institute’s early involvement in its fields since 1986 and describes the AI Nodes as the first parts of a network intended to provide computing resources to ambitious scientists. It sets out the direction for the coming decade:

Over the next decade, we are preparing to be among the first again. We want to reduce the risks of, fund, and accelerate these technologies that sound like science fiction but are now within reach, while guarding against their misuse. This work will rely on sovereign computing infrastructure that research currently lacks.

One example is neuroscientist Jean Hébert: in March 2021, he spoke at a Foresight seminar about replacing aging brain cells with new tissue, at a time when, according to the institute, such ideas were considered fringe. In 2024, he joined the US government agency ARPA-H, where he leads a program to restore the cerebral cortex using transplanted cells.

Peterson is a co-founder of the institute, which grew out of ideas in Eric Drexler’s book on nanotechnology, “Engines of Creation.” According to a 2017 issue of Alcor’s magazine, she has been an Alcor member since the mid-1980s. The organization practices cryonics, freezing people after death in the hope that they can be revived in the future. As a student, Peterson met Drexler and learned about his early ideas for molecular-scale machines. She also learned about cryonics at that time. “Cryonics makes straightforward sense to me. With sufficiently advanced repair capabilities, it could work,” she told the magazine.

The institute will welcome attendees to Vision Weekend, its conference in San Francisco on November 13–15. Duettmann invites people to “celebrate and begin the next decade”.