“Google DeepMind and BioNTech are building AI lab assistants to help researchers plan scientific experiments and better predict their outcomes as companies race to find specialised applications for energy and data-intensive artificial intelligence models.

Sir Demis Hassabis, chief of Google’s AI arm, is leading the company’s efforts to develop a specialised AI model to act as a research assistant, helping scientists to collaborate across disciplines and make unexpected connections more easily…

Over the coming years, he said the tools that DeepMind was building could suggest and design experiments based on a given hypothesis and give scientists a probabilistic view on a proposed experiment’s potential success or failure.

Meanwhile, German drugmaker BioNTech and its London-based AI subsidiary InstaDeep said on Tuesday they had designed a specialised AI assistant known as Laila with a ‘detailed knowledge of biology’ built on top of Meta’s open-source Llama 3.1 model.

In a live demonstration, research scientist Arnu Pretorius showed how the AI agent could automate routine scientific tasks in experimental biology, such as analysis and segmentation of DNA sequences, and the visualisation of experimental results.

Scientists at BioNTech’s laboratory in Mainz also demonstrated how Laila could connect to lab devices and monitor ongoing experiments or tasks being performed by robots, with the assistant detecting a mechanical failure from a BioNTech machine during a live demonstration.”

From Financial Times.