No such thing as an AI chemist (a chemist being someone who has a degree in chemistry or related), oh that's not even the title. Near-autonomous AI chemist improves challenging reaction in medicinal chemistry
I noticed the Wikipedia article so that it was a "graduated scientist" (outside of UK).
It made me wonder what other professions require an associate's degree or better to be able to claim the profession without some sort of modifier, such as licensed physician, or Master plumber...
It's basically high through put screening plus an AI engine to map out the "variable space".
Back in 1990 when robotics became more reliable we did the same thing. The only difference is a trained chemist would determine what variables would be altered.
It's not that hard to do, it doesn't take that much brain power, just an understanding of what variables may impact the yield. Claiming AI can now do this isn't all that impressive.
https://x.com/jmalchow/status/2067298271647904061
GPT-5.4 reviewed scientific literature, generated and ranked research proposals, helped design experiments, analyzed results, and proposed follow-up studies.
Human chemists steered the work, selected proposals for testing, and validated the final result.
Maria [AI] tested the idea across 10,080 reactions, and human chemists later validated representative results by hand.
Under the optimized conditions, yields improved for 88% of the boronic acids and 83% of the sulfonamides tested.
Human chemists then repeated 14 representative reactions by hand: 11 showed higher yields, including 8 with a more than twofold improvement.
The full process took about 2.5 months, plus another half month for human chemists to write up the results.
It made me wonder what other professions require an associate's degree or better to be able to claim the profession without some sort of modifier, such as licensed physician, or Master plumber...
It's basically high through put screening plus an AI engine to map out the "variable space".
Back in 1990 when robotics became more reliable we did the same thing. The only difference is a trained chemist would determine what variables would be altered.
It's not that hard to do, it doesn't take that much brain power, just an understanding of what variables may impact the yield. Claiming AI can now do this isn't all that impressive.