A theoretical physicist by training, Sam Rodriques recognized the possible uses of AI for scientific discovery. In 2023 he co-founded the nonprofit FutureHouse, with a goal to build AI scientists that can formulate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and analyze data by themselves. While AI science is an increasingly crowded field, FutureHouse’s audacious vision and scientific bonafides have earned it the backing of Eric Schmidt and other funders.
This year FutureHouse released a set of AI tools for scientific discovery, which can search scientific literature and databases and help plan experiments. And in May, the organization said its AI agents made their first major discovery: a promising new treatment for dry age-related macular disease (AMD), a major cause of blindness, though the study has not been peer reviewed yet. While human scientists conducted the physical experiments in the lab and wrote the final manuscript, AI agents took care of everything else.
Rodriques contends there are many more such discoveries on the way. It was while pursuing his PhD in neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rodriques says, that he realized advancements in the field were limited by humans’ sheer constraints in reading, processing, and cross-referencing massive amounts of scientific literature. AI, he argues, can perform that part of the scientific process more swiftly.
“It’s like being a professor today: you have a bunch of graduate students working with you. They go do some work, come back, you provide them updates,” he says. “I think it will be like that, just much faster, where every scientist will have their own lab of agents.”
Rodriques says that since May, FutureHouse’s tools have been looking into breast cancer and autism mutations. “In the next two to three years, we are just going to see an exponential increase in the rate at which those connections can be made,” he says. With the acceleration AI can offer, he adds, long-held scientific mysteries could be solved in short order.