DeepMind and BioNTech Bet AI Lab Assistants Will Accelerate Science
Several companies and labs are betting the latest generation of chatbots could make useful research assistants, accelerating science.
There has long been hope that AI could help accelerate scientific progress. Now, companies are betting the latest generation of chatbots could make useful research assistants.
Most efforts to accelerate scientific progress using AI have focused on solving fundamental conceptual problems, such as protein folding or the physics of weather modeling. But a big chunk of the scientific process is considerably more prosaic—deciding what experiments to do, coming up with experimental protocols, and analyzing data.
This can suck up an enormous amount of an academic’s time, distracting them from higher value work. That’s why both Google DeepMind and BioNTech are currently developing tools designed to automate many of these more mundane jobs, according to the Financial Times.
At a recent event, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said his company was working on a science-focused large language model that could act as a research assistant, helping design experiments to tackle specific hypotheses and even predict the outcome. BioNTech also announced at an AI innovation day last week that it had used Meta’s open-source Llama 3.1 model to create an AI assistant called Laila with a “detailed knowledge of biology.”
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