When Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, was just starting his career in technology back in 1975, he got a job at the world-renowned technology think tank Bell Labs, the birthplace of many of today’s most common technologies.
While at Bell Labs, Schmidt co-authored a program called Lex that was one of the first applications to take paper-based text and convert it to computer-readable letter icons.
This idea is at the heart of his newest project which he is calling Future House.
Future House seeks to turn scientific research on its head through the use of artificial intelligence.
One of the great promises of generative AI tools is their ability to instantly provide answers to questions based on millions or even billions of data points.
When scientists publish the results from research projects they are meant to be available for the world to read and for other scientists to absorb and learn from.
However, the underlying technology for scientists to find the work of others is limited by the capabilities of search engines and relies on keywords.
Future House is funded as a non-profit research lab and seeks to allow scientists access to millions of scientific documents where they can go much deeper with their queries than normal search engines will allow, interacting with the data not based just on keywords, but on concepts.
Schmidt also envisions a world in the not-too-distant future where the AI at the heart of Future House will not only be able to help scientists cull through other research but also make suggestions on paths for new research that hasn’t been undertaken before.
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