Meet Coscientist, A Robot Chemist Designing Nobel Prize-winning Chemical Reaction

Science gave birth to artificial intelligence (AI), and now AI is returning the favor by fueling discoveries in its parent field. AI is revolutionizing every stage of the scientific process, from hypothesis generation and experimental design to data analysis and interpretation. This reciprocal relationship is creating a powerful feedback loop that's accelerating scientific advancement across various disciplines.

A system driven by artificial intelligence has autonomously acquired knowledge about specific Nobel Prize-winning chemical reactions and successfully devised a laboratory procedure to replicate them. Remarkably, the AI accomplished this task within a few minutes and achieved success on its initial attempt.

Watch:

The system, called Coscientist, can design, code, and carry out several reactions-making compounds including paracetamol and aspirin-in the wet lab using its robot apparatus. The approach was described in Nature magazine on December 20.

As per a release, it was designed by Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Gabe Gomes and chemical engineering doctoral students Daniil Boiko and Robert MacKnight. It uses large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude, to execute the full range of the experimental process with a simple, plain language prompt.

"The moment I saw a non-organic intelligence be able to autonomously plan, design, and execute a chemical reaction that was invented by humans, that was amazing," says chemist Gabe Gomes at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who led the research. "It was a 'holy crap' moment."

"Beyond the chemical synthesis tasks demonstrated by their system, Gomes and his team have successfully synthesized a sort of hyper-efficient lab partner," said National Science Foundation (NSF) Chemistry Division Director David Berkowitz. "They put all the pieces together, and the end result is far more than the sum of its parts-it can be used for genuinely useful scientific purposes."