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Chemistry

Chemists are teaching GPT-4 to do chemistry and control lab robots

Augmenting the artificial intelligence GPT-4 with extra chemistry knowledge made it much better at planning chemistry experiments, but it refused to make heroin or sarin gas

By Alex Wilkins

29 April 2023

A modified version of GPT-4 can control robot arms

Science Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo

Language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT can be used for automated chemistry, from synthesising chemicals and discovering drugs to designing, planning and carrying out scientific experiments.

Large language models like GPT-4 have been trained on data from much of the internet and appear to be competent at answering problems from a wide range of disciplines, but they can struggle with tasks requiring more expert knowledge, such as chemistry.

“They lack this chemical knowledge and they are not really good at representing …

Article amended on 10 May 2023

We corrected the use of atorvastatin

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