Microsoft wants to tap AI to accelerate scientific discovery

Can AI speed up aspects of the science process? That’s what Microsoft thinks.

According to a press release provided to TechCrunch, Microsoft announced Microsoft Discovery, a platform that “translates (scientific) discovery processes” to “translate agents AI” at its Build 2025 conference on Monday. Microsoft Discovery is “scalable,” says Microsoft, allowing specific science-related workloads to be handled “end-to-end.”

“Microsoft Discovery is an enterprise agent platform that helps accelerate research and discovery by transforming the entire discovery process with agent AI, from inference of scientific knowledge to hypothesis formulation, candidate generation and analysis,” Microsoft explains in the release. “The platform allows scientists and researchers to work with teams of specialized AI agents, helping them to use the latest innovations in AI and supercomputing to drive scientific outcomes at speed, scale and accuracy.”

Microsoft is one of the bullishness of many AI labs on AI for science. Earlier this year, Google said,AI co-scientistWhat the technology giant said can help scientists develop hypotheses and research plans. Futurehouse And Lira Science has Claim Especially when AI tools can dramatically accelerate scientific discovery. medicine.

However, many researchers do not believe that AI is particularly useful today. Leading the scientific processmainly for that Reliability.

Part of the challenges in developing “AI Scientists” is to anticipate an invaluable number of confounding factors. AI may be useful in areas where extensive exploration is required, such as narrowing down a huge list of possibilities, but it is not very clear whether it can provide box-like problem-solving.

The results of AI systems designed for science have so far been almost overwhelming.

In 2023, Google said there were around 40 new materials. Synthesis With the help of one of the AISs called Gnome. but External analysis In fact, we found that even one of these ingredients was not new. Meanwhile, several companies employing AI for drug discovery, including Excientia and Excientia. BenevolentaiI’m suffering famous Failure of clinical trials.

Microsoft definitely wants that effort to be better than what came before.