The Humans Building AI Scientists

The exterior of FutureHouse HQ in San Francisco. From inside an industrial facade in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, a crow takes flight. This tool-using corvid is the chosen mascot of FutureHouse, a nonprofit determined to automate scientific discovery using AI agents that can generate hypotheses, connect existing findings, and even suggest experiments. Since its launch two years ago, FutureHouse has steadily rolled out a family of “crow”-themed tools for researchers. ChemCrow helps design and execute chemical reactions. WikiCrow compiles encyclopedia-style summaries of human proteins — including their structure and known functions — by drawing on thousands of papers. ContraCrow sifts through the literature to find contradictory claims. PaperQA and its successor, PaperQA2, enable users to query PDFs and glean reliable answers without “hallucinated” misinformation. LAB-Bench, their benchmarking suite, measures how well these agents handle real-world biological tasks. And Aviar ... Read full article.