DARPA wants an AI-powered “autonomous scientist” that can help human researchers sort through and develop new working theories, and it’s offering up to $1 million to companies that can do so. Alvaro Velasquez, DARPA’s program manager for Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery, stated that the final product should be “at least 10X better in scalability (problem size, data size etc.) and also in time efficiency.”
DARPA’s autonomous scientist will be creative and learn to generate unique scientific hypotheses. Uses cases for the AI tool include research in climate modeling and materials discovery. Proposals for the autonomous scientist should aim not just to train it to learn data inputs, but to extrapolate novel and unique hypotheses to test based on scientific parameters.
DARPA’s autonomous scientist work is exploratory and is part of the agency’s larger Artificial Intelligence Exploration grant and contract opportunities. The winning foundational models could be used to solve other challenges at DARPA and beyond.
