FutureHouse Launches “AI Research Assistants”: Crow, Falcon, Owl, Phoenix

FutureHouse Launches AI ‘Research Assistants’ that Outperform Human Scientists in some tasks.

The initiative is part of FutureHouse’s broader mission to develop an “AI scientist” capable of automating aspects of the scientific method.

Key Points

FutureHouse, a nonprofit organization backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, has launched a suite of AI tools designed to assist researchers and expedite scientific breakthroughs.

The FutureHouse platform, introduces four specialized agents, Crow, Falcon, Owl and Phoenix, to assist with tasks like literature synthesis, hypothesis generation and experiment planning.

The agents have been benchmarked to outperform human researchers in key tasks such as literature retrieval and synthesis.

The newly released tools—Crow, Falcon, Owl, and Phoenix—each serve specialized functions:

• Crow: It serves as a general-purpose agent that delivers concise, scholarly answers and is optimized for API integration.
• Falcon: Falcon, offers in-depth literature reviews and has access to large-scale databases such as OpenTargets, which allows it to analyze more scientific content than any other comparable agent.
• Owl: Owl, answers whether a specific experiment or study has been conducted before, helping researchers avoid redundant work.
• Phoenix: Phoenix,  assists with experimental chemistry planning through specialized tools.

• In addition to these, FutureHouse has introduced Finch, an AI tool focused on biology research.
• Finch analyzes biological data, generates figures, and inspects results, functioning similarly to a first-year graduate student.
• These tools leverage a vast corpus of open-access scientific papers and employ multi-stage reasoning processes to evaluate sources, aiming to enhance the reliability of their outputs.
• The AI tools are accessible via FutureHouse’s platform and API, providing researchers with resources to potentially accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.

Background

FutureHouse, before launching its latest AI tools—Crow, Falcon, Owl, and Phoenix—had previously developed foundational AI agents like:

PaperQA2 (an open-source system for searching and summarizing academic literature).

Aviary (a framework supporting multi-step lab protocols with autonomy in biology research), which established the groundwork for their “AI Scientists”.

This initiative aimed at democratizing access to scientific expertise and enhancing research efficiency through AI-driven solutions.

News Gist

Schmidt-backed FutureHouse launched specialized AI research tools—Crow, Falcon, Owl, Phoenix, and Finch—building on predecessors PaperQA2 and Aviary.

These agents outperform humans in literature synthesis and experiment planning, advancing FutureHouse’s mission to create autonomous “AI Scientists” that democratize scientific expertise.