Constructing these models took a couple of months, but Pak says they were very quick at designing candidates for therapies once the setup was complete: “I feel it was a day or half a day, something like that.”
Zou says the agents decided to review anti-covid nanobodies, a cousin of antibodies which can be much smaller in size and fewer common within the wild. Zou was shocked, though, at the explanation. He claims the models landed on nanobodies after making the connection that these smaller molecules could be well-suited to the limited computational resources the models got. “It actually turned out to be a very good decision, since the agents were in a position to design these nanobodies efficiently,” he says.
The nanobodies the models designed were genuinely latest advances in science, and most were in a position to bind to the unique covid-19 variant, in accordance with the study. But Pak and Zou each admit that the predominant contribution of their article is de facto the Virtual Lab as a tool. Yi Shi, a pharmacologist on the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved within the work but made among the underlying nanobodies the Virtual Lab modified, agrees. He says he loves the Virtual Lab demonstration and that “the key novelty is the automation.”
accepted the article and fast-tracked it for publication preview—Zou knew leveraging AI agents for science was a hot area, and he desired to be one in every of the primary to check it.
The AI scientists host a conference
When he was submitting his paper, Zou was dismayed to see that he couldn’t properly credit AI for its role within the research. Most conferences and journals don’t allow AI to be listed as coauthors on papers, and plenty of explicitly prohibit researchers from using AI to put in writing papers or reviews. , as an illustration, cites uncertainties over accountability, copyright, and inaccuracies amongst its reasons for banning the practice. “I feel that’s limiting,” says Zou. “These sorts of policies are essentially incentivizing researchers to either hide or minimize their usage of AI.”
Zou desired to flip the script by creating the Agents4Science conference, which requires the first creator on all submissions to be an AI. Other bots then will try to evaluate the work and determine its scientific merits. But people won’t be not noted of the loop entirely: A team of human experts, including a Nobel laureate in economics, will review the highest papers.
Zou isn’t sure what’s going to come of the conference, but he hopes there might be some gems among the many lots of of submissions he expects to receive across all domains. “There could possibly be AI submissions that make interesting discoveries,” he says. “There is also AI submissions which have numerous interesting mistakes.”
While Zou says the response to the conference has been positive, some scientists are lower than impressed.
