Flagship Pioneering, the bioplatform innovation company, has officially announced the launch of a new division called Lila Sciences, a division focused on building the world’s first scientific superintelligence platform and fully autonomous labs for life, chemical, and materials sciences.
According to certain reports, the company, which was founded in Flagship’s labs during 2023, will present to the world an advanced form of AI which, on its part, can process vast amounts of data and make predictions. It can also assist scientists across the board in designing and conducting new experiments, generating hypotheses, as well as testing them in real-world environments.
More on that would reveal how the launch follows up on Lila’s recent raise of around $200 million in committed seed capital from Flagship Pioneering, along with General Catalyst, March Capital, ARK Venture Fund, Altitude Life Science Ventures, Blue Horizon Advisors, State of Michigan Retirement System, Modi Ventures, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA).
As for what the company plans on doing with these funds, the idea is to facilitate the development of a comprehensive AI platform, autonomous labs, and infrastructure for rapid scaling.
Talk about Lila’s Autonomous Science platform, it is specifically designed to, with human guidance, scale and optimize experimentation in any scientific domain. This it does by combining generative AI with generalizable, scalable and autonomous AI science units
In fact, thus far, the platform has already demonstrated performance across multiple areas that exceed human and existing AI-powered benchmarks.
“For all of human history, the method for scientific exploration has been steadfast: we predict, test, learn, create. Yet for all the progress we have made, we still understand only a fraction of the rules that govern the physical world,” said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and Chairman at Lila Sciences. “With Lila, our hypothesis is that by scaling experimentation, we can unlock emergent abilities and enable discoveries that remain hidden at smaller scales. Lila represents an ambitious undertaking that we believe will accelerate science with enormous benefit to society.”
A deeper lowdown of all the benchmarks Lila’s platform has succeeded in would reveal its LLMs that come bearing state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities on important scientific problems and scientific intelligence benchmarks.
Furthermore, the platform has conceived optimal genetic medicine constructs that outperform commercially available therapeutics. It has also discovered, and subsequently, validated hundreds of novel antibodies, peptides., and binders for a broad range of therapeutic targets.
Moving on, the solution would generate unique non-platinum group metals as catalysts in the production of green hydrogen, and it will do so at a fraction of cost associated with current commercial catalysts.
Rounding up highlights would be the platform’s ability in regards to designing new material for industrial-scale carbon capture with better capacity, thermal stability, and kinetic binding than leading products.
Among other things, we ought to mention how the Lila platform will be open to partners across the life and material sciences industries for the purpose of helping them collaboratively develop solutions in human health and sustainability at a pace beyond the current norms.
“AI has already transformed our ability to uncover new insights from existing data. We believe the next frontier in scientific discovery will come from enabling AI to design and run experiments at unprecedented scale. This requires software and hardware innovation in the lab such that, with each iteration of the scientific method, AI systems can orchestrate thousands of experiments simultaneously, systematically building our understanding and accelerating scientific progress. This approach has the potential to advance research across many scientific domains,” said Molly Gibson, Ph.D., Co-Founder and President, Future Science at Lila Sciences and Origination Partner, Flagship Pioneering.
