Sam Rodriques, FutureHouse
AI scientist in action
Samuel G. Rodriques is the Founder & CEO of FutureHouse, a non-profit research lab with the mission to build AI scientist capable of independently hypothesizing, experimenting, analyzing, and scaling scientific discovery. FutureHouse has raised over $200m.
Here are his controversial takes about education, fundraising, and AI that he shared during his dinner with Icons:
1. AI’s scientific progress is accelerating in unexpected ways—what Sam considered impossible a few years ago is now in production. We are about to witness a tsunami of discoveries and innovations across scientific fields.
2. If you start a PhD today, be careful: by the time you graduate, an AI may already do the thing you planned your thesis around. Aim for problems that will still matter in five years.
3. The bulk of upcoming genai breakthroughs in science will come from large-scale knowledge processing. Physical experiments are still a bottleneck, and lab automation technologies are more focused on repetitive processes (like assembly line on a car factory) rather than exploration-style experiments. Fields that don’t need wet-lab validation, math, theory, pure software, will explode first because the feedback loop is instantaneous.
4. If you don’t provide the information to LLM on where to look for scientific hypotheses, it will just hallucinate it because that’s what LLMs are built to do.
5. We won’t solve the aging problem within the next ten years, because proving efficacy alone takes a decade. Most other problems, however, can be solved more quickly.
6. FutureHouse's AI discovered a novel treatment for AMD, a major cause of blindness. The entire process, spanning hypothesis generation to data analysis, was carried out by AI, all while remaining open-access and mission-driven as a non-profit organization.
7. People rarely change the opinions and all VCs already know what they want. Trying to convince VC is full BS, you just need to find VC who already believes that your idea is great and then you make sure he believes you’re the right founder for the idea.
8. AI enables the combination of knowledge from scientific discoveries across countries, regions, and years. In fact, Future House has referenced scientific papers published in the 1800s.