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  • NEWS FEATURE

AI ‘scientists’ joined these research teams: here’s what happened

Emerging ‘co-scientist’ systems use chatbots to mimic the deliberations of a research group. Nature asked researchers to test them out.
By
  1. Nicola Jones

    1. Nicola Jones is a freelance writer in Pemberton, British Columbia.

Illustration showing a pair of hands typing at a keyboard surrounded by digital-looking heads with a network of lines connecting them all together.

Illustration: The Project Twins

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On a Sunday morning in April, pathologist Thomas Montine ran one of the most surreal meetings of his life. In an online test interface for a system called the Virtual Lab, Montine constructed a team of six artificial-intelligence (AI) characters, all powered by a commercial large language model. He gave them specialities: he made a couple neuroscientists, one a neuropharmacologist and another a medicinal chemist. Then, he asked this virtual lab group to examine possible treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and discuss gaps in knowledge, barriers to progress and hypotheses to be tested — the same questions he has to consider in grant applications.

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Nature 643, 22-25 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02028-5

Additional reporting by Richard Van Noorden and Elizabeth Gibney.

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