In a significant advancement for AI-powered scientific research, FutureHouse has officially launched its platform of specialized AI agents designed to transform how scientists conduct research and make discoveries.
The philanthropically-funded nonprofit, backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, released its platform on May 1, 2025, after years of development. The system aims to address what FutureHouse identifies as a critical bottleneck in scientific progress: the overwhelming volume of research literature that even brilliant scientists struggle to navigate effectively.
"The 38 million papers on PubMed, 500,000+ clinical trials, and thousands of specialized tools have created an information bottleneck that even the most brilliant scientists can't navigate," explains FutureHouse in its launch announcement. The platform offers four primary AI agents: Crow for general literature searches, Falcon for deep literature reviews, Owl for identifying previous research, and Phoenix for chemistry experiment planning.
What sets these agents apart is their benchmarked performance. According to FutureHouse, rigorous testing shows they outperform both frontier AI models and PhD-level researchers in head-to-head literature search and synthesis tasks. Unlike general-purpose AI, these agents were built specifically for scientific applications and have access to specialized scientific databases and tools.
The platform has already demonstrated promising results. On May 20, 2025, FutureHouse showcased a multi-agent scientific discovery workflow that identified a new therapeutic candidate for dry age-related macular degeneration (dAMD), a leading cause of irreversible blindness. In June, the company released ether0, a 24B open-weights reasoning model for chemistry.
FutureHouse founders Sam Rodriques and Andrew White envision these agents working as part of a larger system. "Soon, the literature search agents will be integrated with the data analysis agent, the hypothesis generation agent, an experiment planning agent, and they will all be engineered to work together seamlessly," says Rodriques. The platform is accessible to researchers worldwide via both web interface and API at platform.futurehouse.org.