Tech giant Google has developed an AI tool to act as a virtual collaborator for biomedical scientists, the US blue chip said on Wednesday. The new tool, tested by scientists at Stanford University in the US and Imperial College London, uses advanced reasoning to help scientists synthesize vast amounts of literature and generate novel hypotheses, the company said.
AI is being increasingly deployed in the workplace, from answering calls to carrying out legal research, following the success of ChatGPT and similar models over the past year. “Beyond standard literature review, summarization and ‘deep research’ tools, the AI co-scientist system is intended to uncover new, original knowledge and to formulate demonstrably novel research hypotheses and proposals,” Google researchers Juraj Gottweis and Vivek Natarajan wrote in a blog post.
Google in its blog post said it has launched an AI co-scientist, a new AI system built on Gemini 2.0 designed to aid scientists in creating novel hypotheses and research plans.
-Researchers can specify a research goal — for example, to better understand the spread of a disease-causing microbe — using natural language, and the AI co-scientist will propose testable hypotheses, along with a summary of relevant published literature and a possible experimental approach, the tech giant said.
-AI co-scientist is a collaborative tool to help experts gather research and refine their work — it’s not meant to automate the scientific process. We’re excited to see how researchers will use the system for their research, Google said.
-In an experiment on liver fibrosis, Google reported that all approaches suggested by the AI co-scientist demonstrated promising activity and potential to inhibit disease causes. Google noted that the tool showed the capacity to enhance solutions generated by experts over time.
-“While this is a preliminary finding requiring further validation, it suggests a promising avenue for capable AI systems… to augment and accelerate the work of expert scientists,” the company stated.
-The AI co-scientist system is reportedly not intended to fully automate the scientific process. Instead, it is designed for collaboration, allowing experts to interact with the tool using simple natural language and provide feedback, including their own hypotheses for experimental testing.
-Professor José Penadés, from Imperial’s Department of Infectious Disease and the Fleming Initiative (a partnership between Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust) who co-led the experimental work, told The Verdict: “When the Google research team approached us to test its AI platform, we realised we needed to task it with the same scientific questions that we had already explored ourselves and used as the basis of our experimental work.”
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-“This effectively meant that the algorithm was able to look at the available evidence, analyse the possibilities, ask questions, design experiments, and propose the very same hypothesis that we arrived at through years of painstaking scientific research, but in a fraction of the time.”
-Scientists involved in the project emphasised that the tool is meant to complement, not replace, researchers. “We expect that it will… increase, rather than decrease scientific collaboration,” Google scientist Vivek Natarajan said.
-Earlier in February 2025, Google launched a new class of AI models within its Gemini family, providing a cost-effective alternative to models from competitors, including low-cost options from Chinese company DeepSeek.
