When Sam Rodriques was a neurobiology graduate student, he was struck by a fundamental limitation of science. Even if researchers had already produced all the information needed to understand a human cell or a brain, 'I'm not sure we would know it', he says, 'because no human has the ability to understand or read all the literature and get a comprehensive view.' Five years later, Rodriques says he is closer to solving that problem using artificial intelligence (AI). In September, he and his team at the US start-up FutureHouse announced that an AI-based system they had built could, within minutes, produce syntheses of scientific knowledge that were more accurate than Wikipedia pages1. The team promptly generated Wikipedia-style entries on around 17,000 human genes, most of which previously lacked a detailed page. Rodriques is not the only one turning to AI to help synthesize science. For decades, scholars have been trying to accelerate the onerous task of compiling bodies of research...
learn more
