Noubar Afeyan, PhD

The next era of AI-for-science belongs to agents that can reason across domains and test their own hypotheses in a physical lab.

In 1997, Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion. In 2016, AlphaGo’s Move 37 showed AI could generate creative strategies no human had ever conceived. Now, in 2026, we are witnessing the equivalent moment for all of science. Companies like Lila Sciences are building AI systems that autonomously perform the scientific method (generating hypotheses, designing experiments, running physical labs, and iterating) at superhuman speed and scale.