FutureHouse
| FutureHouse | |
|---|---|
| Formation | 2023 |
| Founders | Sam Rodriques, Andrew White |
| Type | Nonprofit research laboratory |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Website | futurehouse.org |
FutureHouse is a nonprofit research laboratory in San Francisco that is trying to build an artificial intelligence scientist. Its stated mission is "to build an AI Scientist to automate and accelerate fundamental science that improves human health".[1] Sam Rodriques and Andrew White founded it in 2023. It works mostly on biology, from a converted warehouse in the Dogpatch district that holds a wet laboratory of 3,000 square feet.[1]
Founders
Rodriques took a doctorate at MIT in 2019, in the laboratory of Ed Boyden, and afterward ran a group at the Francis Crick Institute in London. White is a computational chemist at the University of Rochester. The two met around the time ChatGPT was released in November 2022.[2]
Rodriques is also a named inventor, with Boyden, on a patent granted to MIT in 2022 for "Single molecule peptide sequencing methods".[3] The founders of Glyphic Biotechnologies, a protein-sequencing company, came from the same Boyden laboratory.[4]
Reading the literature
The group's first public work was PaperQA, a program that answers a question by searching scientific papers and citing them. A second version, PaperQA2, was described in September 2024. On three literature tasks it matched or exceeded subject-matter experts who had unrestricted access to the internet and unlimited time. It also wrote cited summaries of scientific topics in the manner of encyclopedia entries, which its authors found "significantly more accurate than existing, human-written Wikipedia articles".[5]
Asked to look for contradictions in the biology literature, PaperQA2 reported 2.34 per paper on average, and human experts validated 70 percent of those.[5] A companion benchmark, LAB-Bench, posted in July 2024, has more than 2,400 multiple-choice questions about practical research tasks such as literature search and molecular cloning.[6]
The platform opened to the public on May 1, 2025, with agents named for birds. PaperQA became Crow and Has Anyone became Owl at the launch.[2]
| Agent | Earlier name | Job |
|---|---|---|
| Crow | PaperQA | Retrieves and summarizes literature |
| Falcon | Compiles and reviews more sources than Crow | |
| Owl | Has Anyone | Checks whether someone has already run an experiment |
| Phoenix | Helps plan chemistry experiments | |
| Finch | Automates data-driven discovery in biology |
Robin and Kosmos
Robin, described in a preprint of May 19, 2025, was built to run the whole loop of research: background reading, a hypothesis, an experiment, and the analysis that produces the next hypothesis. Its authors apply it to dry age-related macular degeneration. Robin proposed enhancing phagocytosis by cells of the retinal pigment epithelium, and identified and validated ripasudil, a rho kinase inhibitor already used in clinics that had never been proposed for this disease. A follow-up RNA sequencing experiment, also designed by Robin, pointed to a lipid pump called ABCA1. The authors say that every hypothesis, experimental plan, analysis and figure in the main text was produced by Robin, and they call the approach semi-autonomous and lab-in-the-loop.[7]
Kosmos, in a preprint of November 2025, runs for up to 12 hours on an open-ended objective and a dataset, alternating between analyzing data, searching papers and proposing hypotheses. An average run executes 42,000 lines of code and reads 1,500 papers. Independent scientists judged 79.4 percent of the statements in its reports to be accurate, which leaves roughly one in five that were not. Collaborators estimated that a run of 20 cycles did the work of six months of their own time.[8] The organization's site rounds this to "Kosmos conducts six months of research in a single day."[1]
Edison Scientific
In 2025 a for-profit company, Edison Scientific, spun out of FutureHouse to sell the AI tools. The nonprofit and the company have separate governance and share an office. The agents first built under the FutureHouse name now belong to Edison's platform.[1]
In Molecular Reality's usage
FutureHouse is not one of the five companies in the brain column of the chart described at Brain lab.[9] Its agents write encyclopedia entries from the literature. The task list of Molecular Reality's game-like management system still carries a dormant quest, worth 500 XP, for writing one about the company.[10]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d "About FutureHouse". FutureHouse. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ a b "Accelerating scientific discovery with AI". MIT Alumni Association. June 30, 2025.
- ^ "US11346842B2: Single molecule peptide sequencing methods". Google Patents. May 31, 2022.
- ^ Devin Coldewey (July 26, 2021). "Glyphic Biotechnologies raises $6M to accelerate protein sequencing by orders of magnitude". TechCrunch.
- ^ a b Skarlinski, Michael D. et al. (2024). "Language agents achieve superhuman synthesis of scientific knowledge". arXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2409.13740.
- ^ Laurent, Jon M. et al. (2024). "LAB-Bench: Measuring capabilities of language models for biology research". arXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2407.10362.
- ^ Ghareeb, Ali Essam et al. (2025). "Robin: A multi-agent system for automating scientific discovery". arXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2505.13400.
- ^ Mitchener, Ludovico et al. (2025). "Kosmos: An AI scientist for autonomous discovery". arXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2511.02824.
- ^ Dev Okonkwo-Hale (August 21, 2026). "The Startup That Says Everyone Else Is Building the Brain". The Picoampere.
- ^ Harriet Quill (October 21, 2026). "A Biotech Run as a Role-Playing Game". Brownian Business Daily.