Building something new

San Francisco
Joined June 2020
What's the connection between west coast junkies, anaesthesia and a new treatment for depression? Ketamine of course! But it took us 22 years to realize it. How can we more efficiently make connections that could lead to new drug treatments? a thread...
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Ali Ghareeb retweeted
Our paper on Robin came out in Nature yesterday -- awesome to see it in print finally. Congrats to the team! @agreeb66 @MichaelaThinks @andrewwhite01 @benjamin0chang and many others.
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The must-read paper is mine. I recommend it.
Today we all lost our jobs..... Three Nature papers showing that scientists in the conventional sense are obsolete At least read the first one.... the AI replaced all things that the scientist does .... nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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Ali Ghareeb retweeted
Our paper on Robin is out at Nature! Robin was the first multiagent system for end-to-end biological research, which we preprinted last year, and was published back to back with Google's awesome Coscientist from @vivnat. Great validation, and major congratulations to the team.
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Ali Ghareeb retweeted
Tuning the cell clock cleanup mechanism with KL001 makes retinal cell cleanup work better. Robin proposed KL001 for dry macular degeneration. The Nature paper tested it in retinal cells.
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Lots of news today. Don't have energy to write a hit tweet, so here's list 1. Our work on doing lab-in-the-loop with agents was published in Nature 2. We announced our first research partnership with a pharmaceutical company 3. We made new persistent code-writing agent
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Ali Ghareeb retweeted
We're pleased to share our first @Nature paper: Robin is the first multi-agent system for discovery in biology that integrates novel hypothesis generation with experimental data analysis in one continuous workflow. In this study, our team, including ophthalmologist @agreeb66, applied Robin to dry age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of irreversible sight loss with limited treatment options. The system proposed drug-repurposing hypotheses, which were then tested experimentally in the lab. Robin developed the experimental strategy for therapeutic hypothesis generation, proposed follow-up experiments, and extracted actionable insights from the resulting data, including validation in primary human retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) stem cells. Robin also proposed a mechanism of enhancing RPE phagocytosis by modulating the cells circadian rhythm using an experimental drug, KL001, that has never before been used in humans or proposed for AMD. To our knowledge, this mechanism had not previously been proposed. This work points to the future of AI-enabled science: systems that connect insights across fields, surface new mechanisms, and turn existing knowledge into testable hypotheses. It also represents the broader opportunity FutureHouse is building toward: AI that helps science cross disciplinary boundaries and move from literature to experiment to discovery. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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Replying to @WillManidis
its amazing how much mileage they get out of this. nerds love solutions that sound highly logical based on a fragmentary understanding of the problem and a lot of optimistic assumptions
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Ali Ghareeb retweeted
During #HealthyAgingMonth learn more about #AMD, which affects 19.8M in the US & is the #1 cause of vision loss in older adults. In the early stages, AMD may have no symptoms at all, making regular dilated eye exams critical to early detection. More at SeeforaLifetime.org.
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At FutureHouse, we’ve noticed scientific agents are good at applying average intelligence across tasks. They always seem to make the obvious choices, which is good, but discovery sometimes requires more intuition and insight than average. We’ve made the first step today towards superhuman insight by training a reasoning model for a specific domain of science: designing drug-like molecules. We’re releasing a 24B open-weights reasoning model called 𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝟶. 𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝟶 has been trained with reinforcement learning to exceed frontier and human experts across a range of molecular design tasks. 𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝟶 takes in natural language, reasons in English, and outputs a new molecule. 𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝟶 is now a tool for our chemistry design agent, Phoenix, which can call upon it to design molecules. Training a reasoning model for a scientific domain like chemistry, rather than math or programming, required a number of small technical advances. For example, we developed an iterative method of split specialist models and aggregation of reasoning traces. Another example is we used LLMs to rewrite questions that were partially solved. A major finding from this work is that we can train with >10x efficiency per experimental measurement when using a reasoning model, rather than fine-tuning. We also found that reasoning models can learn new tasks, developed specifically for this paper and not in pretraining corpora. We even saw a task have 0% performance until 100 steps into RL, at which it randomly solved once. This, along with our change in modality from natural language to molecules, bodes well for applying reasoning models far from natural language. Reasoning models in science are the future. Scientific tasks are naturally verifiable rewards: the physical world is the ultimate arbiter of accuracy, rather than human contractors. The data efficiency gain and ability to exceed frontier models with relatively few parameters/compute mean that we should expect more scientific reasoning models soon. Congrats to team @SidN137, James, @Ryan__Rhys, Albert, @GWellawatte , @maykcaldas , @ludomitch , and @SGRodriques. Thanks to @VoltagePark @nvidia and @huggingface for supporting us, and huge thanks to @ericschmidt for funding @FutureHouseSF The model weights, reward model, and new benchmark are open source. You can also read more about scientific reasoning models in our exclusive with Nature.
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Good finds. On the first point, it looks like that drug is an integrin inhibitor, not a ROCK inhibitor. If you have other information, let me know. The other referenced papers also do not appear to propose ROCK inhibitors as treatments for dAMD. We even cited one of them in our paper. I am super in favor of people trying to disprove our discovery. It is good for science. Keep them coming.
Replying to @pdhsu @malikules
Elicit is really good at seeing if things like this are novel. ROCK inhibitors have been looked at for dry AMD: elicit.com/review/154212ba-6… And using them to increase phagocytosis for dry AMD is also in the literature: elicit.com/review/2afe4377-8…
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Congrats to the team: @MichaelaThinks, @benjamin0chang, @ludomitch, Mo Razzak, Kiki Szostkiewicz, and Angela Yiu.
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Today, we’re announcing the first major discovery made by our AI Scientist with the lab in the loop: a promising new treatment for dry AMD, a major cause of blindness. Our agents generated the hypotheses, designed the experiments, analyzed the data, iterated, even made figures for the paper. The resulting manuscript is a first-of-a-kind in the natural sciences, in which everything that needed to be done to write the paper was done by AI agents, apart from actually conducting the physical experiments in the lab and writing the final manuscript. We are also introducing Robin, the first multi-agent system that fully automates the in-silico components of scientific discovery, which made this discovery. This is the first time that we are aware of that hypothesis generation, experimentation, and data analysis have been joined up in closed loop, and is the beginning of a massive acceleration in the pace of scientific discovery that will be driven by these agents. We will be open-sourcing the code and data next week. Robin is a multi-agent system that uses Crow, Falcon, and Finch, the agents on our platform, to generate novel hypotheses, plan experiments, and analyze data. We asked Robin to find a new treatment for dry age-related macular degeneration. Robin considered the disease mechanisms associated with dry AMD, proposed a specific experimental assay that could be used to evaluate hypotheses in the wet lab, and proposed specific molecules we could test in that assay. We tested the molecules and gave it the resulting data, which it analyzed before proposing more experiments. In the end, it identified Ripasudil, a Rho Kinase inhibitor (ROCK inhibitor) that is approved in Japan for several other diseases, which seems very promising as potential treatment for dry AMD. It also identified specific molecular mechanisms that might underlie the effects of Ripasudil in RPE cells, from an RNA sequencing experiment it proposed. To be clear, no one has proposed using ROCK inhibitors to treat dry AMD in the literature before, as far as we can find, and I think it would have been very difficult for us to come up with this hypothesis without the agents. We have also run the proposed treatment by several experts in AMD, who confirm that it is interesting and novel. Moreover, this project was fast: with Robin in hand, the entire project took about 10 weeks, which is way shorter than it would have taken if we had been doing all of the in-silico components ourselves. Important caveats: We are real biologists at FutureHouse, so I want to be clear that although the discovery here is exciting, we are not claiming that we have cured dry AMD. Fully validating this hypothesis as a treatment for dry AMD will take human trials, which will take much longer. Also, this discovery is cool, but it is not yet a "move 37"-style discovery. At the current rate of progress, I'm sure we will get to that level soon. Congratulations to the team. Congratulations in particular to Robin, which generated the hypotheses, proposed the experiments, analyzed the data and generated the figures. And major congratulations also to the human team, which built Robin: @MichaelaThinks, @agreeb66, @benjamin0chang, @ludomitch, Mo Razzak, Kiki Szostkiewicz, and Angela Yiu.
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Today, we are launching the first publicly available AI Scientist, via the FutureHouse Platform. Our AI Scientist agents can perform a wide variety of scientific tasks better than humans. By chaining them together, we've already started to discover new biology really fast. With the platform, we are bringing these capabilities to the wider community. Watch our long-form video, in the comments below, to learn more about how the platform works and how you can use it to make new discoveries, and go to our website or see the comments below to access the platform. We are releasing three superhuman AI Scientist agents today, each with their own specialization: A general-purpose agent (Crow); An agent to automate literature reviews (Falcon); and An agent to answer the question “Has anyone done X before” (Owl). We are also releasing an experimental agent, Phoenix, that has access to a wide variety of tools for planning experiments in chemistry. More on that below. The three literature search agents (Crow, Falcon, and Owl) have benchmarked superhuman performance. They also have access to a large corpus of full scientific texts, which means that you can ask them more detailed questions about experimental protocols and study limitations that general-purpose web search agents, which usually only have access to abstracts, might miss. Our agents also use a variety of factors to distinguish source quality, so that they don’t end up relying on low-quality papers or pop-science sources. Finally, and critically, we have an API, which is intended to allow researchers to integrate our agents into their workflows. Phoenix is an experimental project we put together recently just to demonstrate what can happen if you give the agents access to lots of scientific tools. It is not better than humans at planning experiments yet, and it makes a lot more mistakes than Crow, Falcon, or Owl. We want to see all the ways you can break it! The agents we are releasing today cannot yet do all (or even most!) aspects of scientific research autonomously. However, as we show in the video, you can already use them to generate and evaluate new hypotheses and plan new experiments way faster than before. Internally, we also have dedicated agents for data analysis, hypothesis generation, protein engineering, and more, and we plan to launch these on the platform in the coming months as well. Within a year or two, it is easy to imagine that the vast majority of desk work that scientists do today will be accelerated with the help of AI agents like the ones we are releasing today. The platform is currently free-to-use. Over time, depending on how people use it, we may implement pricing plans. If you want higher rate limits, especially for research projects, get in touch. @m_skarlinski, @andrewwhite01, @_tnadolski, Remo Storni, @semajazarb, @ludomitch, @MichaelaThinks, as well as @jasonjoyride and his team for making such fantastic videos of us!
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A narrow drug R&D thread following @sethbannon's broader biology post.... Fast "design, build, test" cycles ARE great in drug R&D when way therapeutic candidates score in the test is highly correlated with their clinical utility. But often it isn't. 1/8
Speeding up the design, build, test cycles in biology is one of the most important things we can do.
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