CMU-Designed Artificially Intelligent Coscientist Automates Scientific Discovery

A non-organic intelligent system has for the first time designed, planned and executed a chemistry experiment, Carnegie Mellon researchers report in the Dec. 21 issue of the journal Nature (doi:10.1038/s41586'023 -06792-0). "We anticipate that intelligent agent systems for autonomous scientific experimentation will bring tremendous discoveries, unforeseen therapies and new materials. While we cannot predict what those discoveries will be, we hope to see a new way of conducting research given by the synergetic partnership between humans and machines," the Carnegie Mellon research team wrote in their paper. The system, called Coscientist, was designed by Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering  Gabe Gomes  and chemical engineering doctoral students Daniil Boiko and Robert MacKnight. It uses large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude, to execute the full range of the experimental process with a simple, plain language prompt. For example, a scientist could ask Coscientist to find a compound with given properties.