Unlock Editor’s Digest Lock for Free
FT editor Roula Khalaf will select your favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Google has built an assistant to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to help scientists accelerate biomedical research as companies compete to create specialized applications from cutting-edge technologies.
The US Tech Group’s so-called collaborative scientists tool helps researchers identify knowledge gaps and propose new ideas that can speed up scientific discoveries.
“What we’re trying to do with our project is to see if technologies like AI co-scientists can give these researchers a superpower,” says Google’s senior staff clinical physician science. said Alan Karthikesalingam.
Google’s new tool believes that technology can transform industry from healthcare to energy and education as high-tech companies spend billions of dollars on AI models and products.
Openai, Perplexity, and German drug maker Biontech and its London-based AI subsidiary Instadeep have recently launched their own AI research tools. Meanwhile, Google Deepmind’s Alphafold demonstrates how rapidly evolving technologies can accelerate scientific research.
Early tests of Google’s new tools with experts from Stanford University, Imperial College London and Houston Methodist Hospital found that they could generate scientific hypotheses that demonstrate promising results.
This tool was able to arrive at the same conclusion due to a new gene transfer mechanism that would help scientists understand spreading of antibiotic resistance, as a new breakthrough from imperial researchers.
Imperial results were not in the public domain as they were peer-reviewed in the best scientific journals. This showed that Google’s collaborative scientist tool could reach the same hypothesis using AI inference in just a few days compared to the years the university team spent investigating the issue.
The AI tool was also able to help Stanford researchers find existing drugs that could be reused to treat liver fibrosis. Google’s co-scientists have proposed two drug types that Stanford scientists discovered.
“I think it will be a tool that could change the way we approach science,” said Jose Penades, professor at the Imperial School of Infectious Diseases and Fleming Initiative. .
Recommended
This tool works by using several AI agents that mimic the scientific process. For example, one AI agent specializes in generating ideas, while the other specializes in reviewing those ideas, says Vivek Natarajan, a research scientist at Google. It’s there.
This model can retrieve information from scientific papers and specialized databases that are freely available online, as well as other tools such as Alphafold. The specified information is then analyzed and the researcher is presented with a ranking list of proposals, including explanations and links to sources. Researchers can then refine these proposals.
Tools such as Google’s AI co-scientists could help scientists keep up with all the new information generated in their field, according to an associate professor at Oxford University who developed the AI research tool. One Jakob Foerster said: “I think it’s incredibly valuable,” he said.
