By Zach Winn

FutureHouse founders Sam Rodriques PhD ’19 and Andrew White believe that by giving every scientist access to their AI agents, they can break through the biggest bottlenecks in science and help solve some of humanity’s most pressing problems.

“Natural language is the real language of science,” Rodriques says. “Other people are building foundation models for biology, where machine learning models speak the language of DNA or proteins, and that’s powerful. But discoveries aren’t represented in DNA or proteins. The only way we know how to represent discoveries, hypothesize, and reason is with natural language.”

For his PhD research at MIT, Rodriques sought to understand the inner workings of the brain in the lab of Professor Ed Boyden.

“The entire idea behind FutureHouse was inspired by this impression I got during my PhD at MIT that even if we had all the information we needed to know about how the brain works, we wouldn’t know it because nobody has time to read all the literature,” Rodriques explains. “Even if they could read it all, they wouldn’t be able to assemble it into a comprehensive theory. That was a foundational piece of the FutureHouse puzzle.”