AI system learnt, recreated award-winning chemical reactions in lab on its own, study describes

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

artificial intelligence (AI)-driven system was autonomously able to learn about some Nobel Prize-winning chemical reactions and design a successful laboratory procedure to make them, new research published in the journal Nature describes. One of the most complex reactions that their creation, named 'Coscientist' by the researchers, was able to pull off pertains to organic chemistry and is known as palladium-catalysed cross couplings, which in 2010 earned its human inventors the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of the role of these reactions in pharmaceutical development process.
«This is the first time that a non-organic intelligence planned, designed and executed this complex reaction that was invented by humans,» said Gabe Gomes, a Carnegie Mellon University (US) chemist and chemical engineer, who led the research team that assembled and tested Coscientist.

Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill Courses

The researchers said that the demonstrated abilities of Coscientist show the potential for humans to productively use AI to increase the pace and number of scientific discoveries, as well as improve the replicability and reliability of experimental results.
The software and silicon-based parts, or the 'brains', of Coscientist primarily comprise large language models, which are known to power the functioning of chatbots like GPT-4, the team said in their study.
Large language models are trained on huge amounts of textual data, as a result of which, these AI models are capable of processing,