Infrastructure for scientific superintelligence

Synthetic Sciences is an AI research lab building infrastructure for scientific superintelligence.

AI systems are already producing breakthroughs in mathematics, with new discoveries arriving in rapid succession. Mathematics has fast, trustworthy verification, and research there needs little more than a model and a proof checker. The empirical sciences have neither, which leaves two problems.

The first is intelligencein·tel·li·gence nounthe ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.. Experiments are slow, expensive and approximate, so models can’t brute-force the solution space. The best scientists make progress anyway. What sets them apart is experimental taste: knowing which experiments are worth running, anticipating what they will show and understanding what the results mean. We think taste can be formalized, measured and trained.

The second is infrastructurein·fra·struc·ture nounthe basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.. A model with taste still needs compute, instruments, simulators, often labs, and a harness to operate them. Almost none of it is built for autonomous agents.

Our goal is to advance both. We’re going after machine learning first, where experiments run on compute and the infrastructure already exists. For the physical sciences, we’re building high-throughput, semi-autonomous labs in which agents design experiments and execute them through automated instruments and human operators. The first, Lab1, comes online soon.

In each domain, we build long-horizon evaluations that measure whether models can form hypotheses, design and run experiments, interpret results and make progress under resource constraints. Then we work out novel ways to train those capabilities at scale.

If you’d like your models to be better at research, write to founders@syntheticsciences.ai.

We’re a small, talent-dense team of International Olympiad medalists and AI researchers, backed by Y Combinator, Z Fellows, Charlie Songhurst, Walter Kortschak, Edward Lando, scout funds from Sequoia and a16z, and others. We’re hiring exceptional researchers and engineers: team@syntheticsciences.ai.