SAIL Conference
Andrew White
FutureHouse
Nov 3, 2026
AI Progress
Model intelligence doubles every ~4 months
METR Task Completion Benchmark metr.org
Effect is Visible in Economy
AI models are superhuman in math
Millennium Prize
OpenAI reports a solution to Navier–Stokes in September 2026.
Only 1 other Millennium Prize problem solved in 25 years.
ARC-AGI
2025: o3 scores 87.5% for ~$500,000.
2026: Astra scores higher for ~$20.
Math Olympiad
OAI, Ant, and many start-ups got perfect scores 42/42 on IMO 2026.
1 Millennium Prize / NYT 2 ARC-AGI / Noam Brown 3 IMO / China Daily
1 NASA OIG Report oig.nasa.gov 2 US FHWA fhwa.dot.gov 3 US Telecom Capex Report ustelecom.org 4 Morgan Stanley AI Market Trends 2026
What about in science?
Labbench 2
1,912 questions across accessing data, reading patents, reading figures, protocol understanding, etc.
Example: Deletion of which residues from C. elegans protein COSA-1 would most likely affect the ability of COSA-1 to recruit MSH5 and ZHP3?
Residues 31–40
Labbench 2 Accuracy
FutureHouse
- FutureHouse founded in 2023
- Cofounded by Andrew White, Sam Rodriques
- Based in San Francisco with Wetlab
- Funded primarily by Eric Schmidt
FutureHouse Timeline
Introduction to AI Agents
Agent: trained, makes decisions
Environment: untrained, has tools, state
How are agents trained?
- Pre-training — broad knowledge via next-token prediction
- Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) — learn from expert instruction–response pairs
- Reinforcement Learning (RL) — optimize through environment interaction with verifiable rewards
RL expands capabilities beyond what supervised data can teach
Verifiable Rewards
Computational checks (code execution, tool outputs) produce objective reward signals — no human feedback needed
LabBench2: verifiable tasks as RL training signal
Laurent et al., LabBench2, 2026; Narayanan et al., Aviary, 2024; 2025 NVIDIA Technical Blog
Behavior Changes
Training Curve
Narayanan et al., Aviary: training language agents on challenging scientific tasks, 2024
FutureHouse Agents
| Name | Environment | Key Tools |
|---|---|---|
| PaperQA | Literature Research | Search, Citation Traversal |
| ProteinCrow | Designing novel proteins | AlphaFold2, Molecular Dynamics |
| ChemCrow/Phoenix | Designing new molecules | Retrosynthesis, self-driving robotic lab |
| Data analysis crow | Generating discoveries from data | bioinformatics tools, code, file system |
Complete cycle of disease to target to drug
ROBIN: A Multi-Agent System for Automating Scientific Discovery Nature, 19 May 2026
Ali Essam Ghareeb*, Benjamin Chang*, Ludovico Mitchener, Angela Yiu, Caralyn J. Szostkiewicz, Jon M. Laurent, Muhammed T. Razzak, Andrew D. White†, Michaela M. Hinks‡, Samuel G. Rodriques
Robin proposes follow-up experiments
Robin optimizes the therapeutic candidates
Edison Scientific
- Spinout from FutureHouse formed in 2025
- AIxBio Research Lab that partners with biotech and pharma
- 80 employees
- $70M in seed financing
- offices in New York, Boston, San Francisco
- Announced major deal with Pfizer last week.
State of Agents in 2026
Tool-State Paradox
$T_1=$ alphafold2
$T_2=$ $\beta$-sheet percentage
$T_2\rightarrow$ error, no pdb
$T_1,T_2\rightarrow$ success
$T_1,T_1,T_2\rightarrow$ need to treat multiple structures
Engineers must consider $O(2^{N})$ interactions between tools: will not scale past ~10 tools
Code-writing agents
LLMs manage state, you must only write good code
Challenges:
- Must create persistent sandboxed computers for agents
- Must solve security and authentication for agents
Kosmos Agent
A persistent always-on colleague that has access to 80% of public data, our chemistry and literature agents, and world models of biology
