Democratizing AI scientists using ToolUniverse
AI scientists are emerging computational systems that serve as collaborative
partners in discovery. These systems remain difficult to build because they are
bespoke, tied to rigid workflows, and lack shared environments that unify
tools, data, and analyses into a common ecosystem. In omics, unified ecosystems
have transformed research by enabling interoperability, reuse, and
community-driven development; AI scientists require comparable infrastructure.
We present ToolUniverse, an ecosystem for building AI scientists from any
language or reasoning model, whether open or closed. TOOLUNIVERSE standardizes
how AI scientists identify and call tools, integrating more than 600 machine
learning models, datasets, APIs, and scientific packages for data analysis,
knowledge retrieval, and experimental design. It automatically refines tool
interfaces for correct use by AI scientists, creates new tools from natural
language descriptions, iteratively optimizes tool specifications, and composes
tools into agentic workflows. In a case study of hypercholesterolemia,
ToolUniverse was used to create an AI scientist to identify a potent analog of
a drug with favorable predicted properties. The open-source ToolUniverse is
available at https://aiscientist.tools.
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72e8
Shanghua Gao
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72e9
Richard Zhu
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72ea
Pengwei Sui
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72eb
Zhenglun Kong
claimed_verified
2025-09-30T06:34:01.295Z
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/avatars/e3ddbd15f50b86958377b5fc2460a57e.svg
Tony Kong
user
TonyK
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72ec
Sufian Aldogom
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72ed
Yepeng Huang
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72ee
Ayush Noori
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72ef
Reza Shamji
claimed_verified
2025-09-30T06:33:00.082Z
686445c64b2dd0745a049817
/avatars/34c4b2ef075f80baf9376cbcfec841d6.svg
Reza Shamji
user
rezashamji
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72f0
Krishna Parvataneni
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72f1
Theodoros Tsiligkaridis
68db40a4d2bf1f4b15ec72f2
Marinka Zitnik
Democratizing AI scientists using ToolUniverse
AI scientists are emerging computational systems that serve as collaborative
partners in discovery. These systems remain difficult to build because they are
bespoke, tied to rigid workflows, and lack shared environments that unify
tools, data, and analyses into a common ecosystem. In omics, unified ecosystems
have transformed research by enabling interoperability, reuse, and
community-driven development; AI scientists require comparable infrastructure.
We present ToolUniverse, an ecosystem for building AI scientists from any
language or reasoning model, whether open or closed. TOOLUNIVERSE standardizes
how AI scientists identify and call tools, integrating more than 600 machine
learning models, datasets, APIs, and scientific packages for data analysis,
knowledge retrieval, and experimental design. It automatically refines tool
interfaces for correct use by AI scientists, creates new tools from natural
language descriptions, iteratively optimizes tool specifications, and composes
tools into agentic workflows. In a case study of hypercholesterolemia,
ToolUniverse was used to create an AI scientist to identify a potent analog of
a drug with favorable predicted properties. The open-source ToolUniverse is
available at https://aiscientist.tools.
ToolUniverse is an ecosystem that standardizes and integrates tools, models, and data for AI scientists, enabling automated refinement, creation, and composition of workflows.
AI scientists ToolUniverse machine learning models datasets APIs scientific packages data analysis knowledge retrieval experimental design tool interfaces natural language descriptions tool specifications agentic workflows hypercholesterolemia drug analogs