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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛

@andrew.diffuse.one
3.1K followers 234 following 91 posts

Head of Sci/cofounder at futurehouse.org. Prof of chem eng at UofR (on sabbatical). Automating science with AI and robots in biology. Corvid enthusiast

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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 29/10/2025
Making "AI Scientists" has become a hot topic lately. The first reference I could find was from 2008. The term has been used for 20 years! Like "Adam," an AI Scientist robot for studying yeast was published in 2009. I wrote a short post about the term and what it means now. diffuse.one/p/w1-001
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 26/09/2025
So we probably won't be getting a direct simulation of a whole virtual cell at meaningful timescales any time soon. Oh, and it would require 20x current earth power generation. 3/3 Read the analysis/blog post here: diffuse.one/p/d1-009
diffuse.one
diffuse.one
andrew white's blog.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 26/09/2025
It sounds insane, but remember there are 10^14 atoms in a human cell and 10^20 femtoseconds in a day. And across multiple simulation engines, it requires 10^4 FLOPs per atom x femtosecond 2/3
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 26/09/2025
I finished my estimate on required compute to make an atomic-resolution virtual cell: 10^38 FLOPs to simulate a human cell for 1 day. We should be able to do this simulation in 2074 using 200 TW of power. 1/3
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 19/09/2025
yea, those are the model thoughts. It has a lot of mistakes in its thoughts. But you've got a very good eye! We'll make sure the final paper has a pristine example of its thoughts.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 19/09/2025
Our ether0 paper was accepted at NeurIPS 2025! Very proud of the FutureHouse team!
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 16/09/2025
Very good point - I can re-run without that phrase.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 16/09/2025
If you don't put phrase in quotes, it's an or. So it was "α" equation which is equivalent to "α" OR equation
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 14/09/2025
You can also look at it over time. Here's relatively popularity of different animal models in research over time. Anyway, found this to be interesting. More details about it here: diffuse.one/p/d2-003 3/3
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 14/09/2025
Here's one measuring the frequency of sample sizes. Like how often people use 8 samples vs 12 samples for reporting research results. N=2 is apparently the most popular 2/3
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 14/09/2025
Google scholar has a full-text index of nearly all research papers. You can use it to get counts for arbitrary phrases. I've been using this to measure popularity of things in science. For example, here's the popularity of Greek letters used in equations 1/3
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 15/08/2025
read it here: diffuse.one/p/d2-002
diffuse.one
diffuse.one
andrew white's blog.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 15/08/2025
I've written up some thoughts on publishing for machines. 10M research papers are published per year and there are 227M total - machines will be primary producers and readers of publications going forward. Humans can simply not keep up. It's time to think about revising the scientific paper.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 23/07/2025
We make evals at FutureHouse. It’s hard and it sucks. It’s also now the bottleneck, as we scratch the boundary of human ability. HLE was a huge effort and made many good questions and we hope this analysis stimulates review of the other HLE categories and improvements 7/7
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 23/07/2025
We have written up our analysis: www.futurehouse.org/research-ann... And made a gold subset on @huggingface that passed our review: huggingface.co/datasets/fut... 6/7
huggingface.co
futurehouse/hle-gold-bio-chem · Datasets at Hugging Face
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 23/07/2025
We reviewed 150 of the questions in the chem and bio and found about 30% have peer-reviewed papers contradicting their ground-truth answers. Issues include confusion of species with orders, misreading of FDA guidelines, etc. All our notes are public. 5/7
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 23/07/2025
The HLE rubric wanted questions to have “objectively correct, univocal” ground-truth answers. You can find multiple peer-reviewed papers that contradict the statement "Oganesson was the rarest noble gas in 2002 as a percentage of terrestrial matter" 4/7
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 23/07/2025
It’s a clever question. But it’s not really about frontier science. Multiple papers have shown that Oganesson is not a gas (it’s predicted to be semiconducting solid), it’s not noble (it’s reactive), and it isn’t included in any "terrestrial matter" tables of noble gases. 3/7
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 23/07/2025
The design process of HLE required the questions to be unanswerable by contemporary LLMs. That lead to many gotcha style questions like the one below. It’s a trick question – in 2002, a few atoms of a group 18 element Oganesson were made for a few milliseconds. 2/7
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 23/07/2025
HLE has recently become the benchmark to beat for frontier agents. We at FutureHouse took a closer look at the chem and bio questions and found about 30% of them are likely invalid based on our analysis and third-party PhD evaluations. 1/7
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 12/07/2025
I just noticed it has sound lol. It's amazing
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The Align Foundation @alignbio.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
1/4 🚀 Announcing the 2025 Protein Engineering Tournament. This year’s challenge: design PETase enzymes, which degrade the type of plastic in bottles. Can AI-guided protein design help solve the climate crisis? Let’s find out! ⬇️ #AIforBiology #ClimateTech #ProteinEngineering #OpenScience
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 22/06/2025
It may take a bit to extract the function, but here it is: github.com/Future-House...
github.com
ether0/src/ether0/rewards.py at c8cc676354e926b50ad206a606e04489bc9c95e3 · Future-House/ether0
A scientific reasoning model, dataset, and reward functions for chemistry. - Future-House/ether0
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 22/06/2025
I have written up a 3.5k word/10 figure essay on how to write a reward function while avoiding reward hacking for chemistry. It covers all the ridiculous ways we had to avoid reward hacking for training ether0, our scientific reasoning model. diffuse.one/p/m1-000
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 20/05/2025
Although the discovery here is exciting, we are not claiming that we have cured dry AMD. Fully validating this hypothesis as a treatment for dry AMD will take human trials, which will take much longer. Blog: www.futurehouse.org/research-ann... Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.13400
futurehouse.org
Demonstrating end-to-end scientific discovery with Robin: a multi-agent system | FutureHouse
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 20/05/2025
The code for this is really minimal - similar to Google Co-Scientist we used multiple agents (from our platform in this case) and tournament-style rankings to select ideas. We're open sourcing it next week, along with all the trajectories.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 20/05/2025
The figures, hypothesis, original and follow-up experiments were all generated from our agents. Interestingly, only the lab-work and the paper writing were not automated (which is the opposite of what I would have predicted 2 years ago).
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 20/05/2025
FutureHouse's goal has been to automate scientific discovery. Now we used our agents to make a genuine discovery – a potential new treatment for one kind of blindness (dAMD). We had multiple cycles of hypotheses, experiments, and data analysis – including identify the mechanism.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 13/05/2025
We shipped multi-agents today! Our chemistry design agent can now call Crow, our scholarly research agents, to bring in data from literature/clinical trials/open targets while designing molecules. platform.futurehouse.org
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 11/05/2025
Integrating @opentargets.org is so helpful to provide evidence for disease mechanisms independent of the literature. Here's a demo of synthesizing 78 papers and open targets to propose two novel targets for triple negative breast cancer See the answer: platform.futurehouse.org/trajectories...
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 09/05/2025
We have an API for clinical trials on our platform - which means you can ask questions like "what trials will read out in June for NSCLC and how likely would you rate their success based on previous trials in the area." Pretty cool. Answer: platform.futurehouse.org/trajectories...
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 06/05/2025
Here's a command that converts a DOI to bibtex:
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Paul Sample @paulsample.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
I always look forward to FutureHouse releases. I had to do a little digging for API information so here it is for those who are interested. futurehouse.gitbook.io/futurehouse-...
futurehouse.gitbook.io
FutureHouse Platform API Documentation | FutureHouse Cookbook
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Reposted by Andrew White 🐦‍⬛
Brian Naughton @btnaughton.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
We have gotten some really good responses to science questions from platform.futurehouse.org already. Both from "Crow" (short answers) and "Falcon" (deep research). It looks like this is state of the art right now!
platform.futurehouse.org
FutureHouse Platform
AI Agents for Scientific Discovery
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 01/05/2025
Really happy to have this available on an API and free, today!
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 01/05/2025
Try it here: platform.futurehouse.org And learn more about how we made it and what it does: www.futurehouse.org/research-ann...
platform.futurehouse.org
FutureHouse Platform
AI Agents for Scientific Discovery
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 01/05/2025
The plan at FutureHouse has been to build scientific agents for discoveries. We’ve spent the last year researching the best way to make agents. We’ve made a ton of progress and now we’ve engineered them to be used at scale, by anyone. Free and on API.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 18/03/2025
Sam Cox and I are giving the MIA seminar at the Broad Institute in Boston tomorrow. Going to tease some new results on something unrelated to scientific agents and squarely in domain of chemistry.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 09/03/2025
This is amazing - thank you!
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 08/03/2025
And if you want all the functional groups: I would actually love to have someone explain what the correct answer for this molecule.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 08/03/2025
Nice - looks cool!
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 08/03/2025
100% agree with this critique. We did our best on QA here, but this one slipped by. We'll revise it soon - let me know if you find any other trivial ones like this.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 08/03/2025
It's ridiculous, but there hasn't existed a one-liner to quickly get functional groups of a molecule. Little Friday night coding exercise to get this working. Enjoy - and let me know of any missing functional groups! I could only do a few hundred.
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 04/03/2025
See data: huggingface.co/datasets/fut... Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2503.00096 Blog: www.futurehouse.org/research-ann...
futurehouse.org
FutureHouse
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 04/03/2025
Half of an AI scientist is rejecting or accepting hypotheses. FutureHouse and Science Machines just put out ~300 novel hypotheses from ~50 published papers along with ground-truth data. Humans take 4.2 hours to solve these and frontier models get 10-20% correct. This is like SWE-bench for comp bio
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 25/02/2025
We should start using SI notation for token counts - like 1 megatoken context window or 64 kilotoken reasoning model. Then we can write: 64kt or 1mk etc. Or you can say - "my prompt is 1.6 kilotokens" - which sounds badass
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 25/02/2025
PaperQA2 can now work with clinical trials. It considers both research papers and clinical trials jointly to answer complex questions. It uses the the clinicial trials dot gov API - so it can do complex queries too. Checkout the tutorial below: futurehouse.gitbook.io/futurehouse-...
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 22/02/2025
It's been about a month since the first batch of reasoning models was released. There’s been about a dozen reproductions since then and some patterns are emerging. I’ve written up my own notes on training recipes, frameworks, rumors, and major open questions. diffuse.one/p/d2-000
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 20/02/2025
for the nostalgia :)
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Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrew.diffuse.one · 19/02/2025
This is still an early topic and my work is very preliminary, but I think we may be able to start auditing scientific literature at scale. I’ve written up a lot of thoughts, background, and analysis in a blog post: diffuse.one/p/d1-008 4/4
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