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FutureHouse's superhuman science agents

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May 5, 2025

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Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Scientific research is about to hit new speeds, with FutureHouse releasing four superhuman AI agents that are said to outperform even PhD researchers.

With agentic research assistants about to crawl through millions of papers and datasets, a giant wave of AI-driven scientific breakthroughs is getting closer and closer.


In today’s AI rundown:

  • FutureHouse’s ‘superintelligent’ science agents

  • Apple, Anthropic partner on coding platform

  • Create interactive crosswords from your lessons

  • Google tackles AI's energy, workforce shortages

  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

FUTUREHOUSE

🧪 FutureHouse’s ‘superintelligent’ science agents

Image source: FutureHouse

The Rundown: Eric Schmidt-backed FutureHouse launched a new suite of specialized AI research agents designed for scientific discovery, aiming to tackle the information bottleneck researchers face when navigating millions of papers and databases.

The details:

  • The platform offers four specialized agents, Crow, Falcon, Owl, and Phoenix — all immediately accessible via web or API.

  • Crow handles general research, Falcon conducts deep literature reviews, Owl IDs previous research, and Phoenix specializes in chemistry workflows.

  • FutureHouse said the agents reach superhuman levels in literature search and synthesis, beating out both PhD researchers and top traditional search models.

  • The agents can access specialized scientific databases and have transparent reasoning, allowing researchers to track how they arrive at a conclusion.

Why it matters: Plenty of labs are pursuing similar goals, but unlike FutureHouse, only a few have a product already available. The AI science wave is coming, and the ability to synthesize vast amounts of data and reason through libraries of research will soon be embedded into every scientific workflow.

TOGETHER WITH SALESFORCE

🧠 Lessons from 500,000 Agentforce customer conversations

The Rundown: Salesforce added Agentforce to its Help site in October 2024, giving customers 24/7 AI-powered support. Just 6 months later, AI agents have handled 500,000+ customer conversations with efficiency and empathy.

Takeaways from this implementation include:

  • Support teams now have more time to focus on high-touch customer engagements

  • AI agent implementation requires time to find the right mix of agent vs. human support

  • The most effective future involves humans and AI working together for customer success

Get more insights on how agents are redefining customer service.

APPLE & ANTHROPIC

🤝 Apple, Anthropic partner on coding platform

Image source: o3 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Apple is reportedly partnering with AI startup Anthropic to develop a new AI-powered ‘vibe-coding’ platform that will automate writing, editing, and testing code within Apple’s Xcode software, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

The details:

  • Apple’s revamped Xcode will incorporate Anthropic's Claude Sonnet model, with plans to initially test the system internally before a public release.

  • The "vibe-coding" tool will feature a conversational interface, allowing programmers to easily request, modify, and troubleshoot code.

  • Apple is expected to further diversify its external AI integrations by adding Google's Gemini later this year, alongside an existing partnership with OpenAI.

Why it matters: Despite Apple typically favoring in-house development, the Apple Intelligence debacle may have the tech giant branching out to industry leaders to play catch-up. Apple’s massive user base likely doesn’t care whether the company has its own SOTA model — they just need an actual functioning product across the ecosystem.

AI TRAINING

🧩 Create interactive crosswords from your lessons

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to turn any lesson material into engaging crossword puzzles by combining NotebookLM's AI analysis with CrosswordLabs' puzzle generator.

Step-by-step:

  1. Visit NotebookLM and click "Create new" to start a fresh notebook for your lesson materials.

  2. Upload your content by clicking “Add” in the Sources section: PDFs, documents, and audio files all work great.

  3. Use the prompt “Create [number] clues for a crossword in the following style. Do not add any bullets or formatting: Dog man’s best friend…” in the chat section.

  4. Copy the generated word-clue pairs and paste them directly into CrosswordLabs to automatically build your puzzle.

Pro tip: For vocabulary-heavy subjects, create separate crosswords for different units, then combine key terms from each into a comprehensive review puzzle.

PRESENTED BY TAVUS

🗣️ AI that speaks — and shows up

The Rundown: A Tavus avatar appeared in a NY courtroom, sparking a national debate — and showcasing a groundbreaking future where AI doesn't just speak, but visually represents and communicates effectively at scale.

With Tavus, you can:

  • Build real-time video agents and generate realistic videos instantly via simple APIs

  • Create agents with 30+ languages, natural expressions, and tool-calling capabilities

  • Deploy versatile video agents anywhere human interaction occurs

Start building video agents today.

GOOGLE

⚡️ Google tackles AI's energy, workforce shortages

Image source: o3 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Google just released a new policy roadmap addressing America's power infrastructure challenges, while also announcing a major initiative to train 130K electrical workers needed to support the AI boom.

The details:

  • Google’s “Powering a New Era of American Innovation” outlines 15 proposals focused on energy generation, grid modernization, and labor development.

  • The company is also funding the Electrical Training Alliance to modernize electrician training with AI, targeting a 70% boost in the workforce by 2030.

  • The program will upskill 100K existing electrical workers and create 30K new apprenticeships to address the growing gap in qualified workers.

  • The initiative expands on Google's AI Opportunity Fund commitment to train 1M Americans in AI skills, now including crucial infrastructure roles.

Why it matters: With AI driving massive power demands, the U.S. faces an electricity challenge on two fronts — modernizing its own grid while also finding and training enough skilled workers to build and maintain it. With China also investing heavily in energy, the fuel of the AI race will be just as important as chips or training techniques.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

  • 🔌 Integrations - Connect external apps and tools to Claude

  • 🧠 Phi-4 - Microsoft’s latest family of small, reasoning-focused models

  • 🤖 Nova Premier - Amazon’s new multimodal ‘teacher’ model for fine-tuning

  • 🌌 Midjourney Omni Reference - Use objects/characters from prompt images

💼 AI Job Opportunities

  • 🤝 The Rundown - Partnerships Manager

  • 🔍 Findem - Manager, Search Optimization

  • 🎧 Meta - Experience Prototyper, Audio

  • 🤖 Sanctuary AI - Field Service Technician

📰 Everything else in AI today

Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro completed Pokémon Blue, with an independent engineer streaming the game after noting the (still unsuccessful) Claude Plays Pokémon.

Anthropic is reportedly offering to buy back employee shares at a $61.5B valuation, allowing current and former staff to sell up to 20% of their equity for up to $2M each.

U.S. AI czar David Sacks projects that AI will undergo a 1,000,000x increase over the next four years, driven by exponential growth of algorithms, chips, and compute.

Google is reportedly rolling out access to Gemini for children under 13, which will include safety guardrails and only be available for Family Link supervised accounts.

Google DeepMind’s Nikolay Savinov said that 10M+ token context windows are coming “reasonably soon,” which will create unrivaled and superhuman coding tools.

Zoom researchers published “Chain of Draft,” a new AI prompting strategy that achieves similar accuracy to the popular Chain-of-Thought using just 7% of the tokens.

COMMUNITY

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team

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