Study Shows AI Can Conduct One Million Microbial Experiments Annually.

An AI system called BacterAI has enabled robots to conduct up to 10,000 autonomous scientific experiments per day, potentially driving a drastic leap forward in the pace of discovery in areas from medicine to agriculture to environmental science. The system mapped the metabolism of two microbes associated with oral health, discovering the amino acid requirements for the growth of both Streptococcus gordonii and Streptococcus sanguinis. BacterAI creates its own data set through a series of experiments, analyzing the results of previous trials to come up with predictions of what new experiments might give it the most information.