Two AI-based science assistants succeed with drug-retargeting tasks

Key points

• On Tuesday, Nature released two papers describing AI systems intended to help scientists develop and test hypotheses.
• One, Google’s Co-Scientist, is designed as what they term “scientist in the loop,” meaning researchers are regularly applying their judgments to direct the system.
• The second, from a nonprofit called FutureHouse, goes a step beyond and has trained a system that can evaluate biological data coming from some specific classes of experiments.
• While Google says its system will also work for physics, both groups exclusively present biological data, and largely straightforward hypotheses—this drug will work for that.
• So, this is not an attempt to replace either scientists or the scientific process.