Could an AI Win the Nobel Prize? Maybe By 2050, If This Project Is Successful

If AI doesn’t take your job, it might, at minimum, take over some of your duties – that’s the more optimistic sentiment increasingly touted as generative AI becomes part of everyday working life for millions of people around the world.

Even scientific researchers could soon have their workloads lightened, thanks to artificial intelligence.

But could AI ever carry out so many of a researcher’s tasks that it becomes tantamount to a co-researcher? Could it even be eligible for a research prize?

That’s the lofty aim of one Japanese AI developer. And they’re not just going for any old prize.

“We hope that our AI robots will also achieve Nobel-level research someday,” Dr. Yoshitaka Ushiku, vice president of research at Omron Sinic X, told Technology Networks.

Speaking at Technology Networks’ Laboratory of the Future 2025 event – fittingly, via an AI translator – Dr. Ushiku outlined his project’s efforts to create the ultimate AI research partner.

Modeling the scientific process

Omron’s AI development approach frames research as a loop: hypothesize, experiment, analyze and refine.

“If AI and robots could cover most or all of the steps,” Ushiku said, “humans might only need to set the overall direction – that is our ideal vision.”

For this vision to work, however, AI must do more than mimic past experiments; it must learn scientific reasoning. How? Well, partly by observing the many steps of countless cases of actual scientific reasoning.

“We wanted an AI to watch cooking videos, understand what the person is doing and generate a recipe automatically,” Ushiku told the Technology Networks audience. “We realized the same idea could apply to scientific experiments.”

Taking this logical step, Ushiku’s team at Omron Sinic X asked actual scientific researchers to wear head-mounted cameras. The team then linked that visual data to the researchers’ lab notes, providing their AI with annotated footage to learn from.

The hope is that, by feeding the AI video after video, the computer intelligence will eventually develop some scientific intuition of its own. Early results are already promising.

In one example, an AI trained in a virtual environment learned to scoop and measure powders with sub-milligram precision. In another, natural language instructions were translated into a plan the AI successfully executed.

By firmly basing their training program in real-world experiments, the team hope to avoid the “hallucinations” that increasingly plague large language models.

Ushiku credits his background in computer vision and natural language processing for laying the foundation of what’s now possible.

“I started working on caption generation without templates,” he said. “Instead of combining elements like ‘a dog’ and ‘running’ with a template such as ‘X is Y-ing,’ I focused on generating complete sentences from scratch.”

“Our initial model produced captions like ‘a cow walking in front of a person,’ showing it could generate sensible sentences without relying on templates,” he added.

A vision for 2050

Thanks to this early captioning foundation and the work that has followed, Omron’s AI co-researcher is on-target to hit its first goal by the end of the year: to be able to read scientific papers, understand experimental setups and automatically replicate experiments.

“We have already demonstrated the ability [of AI] to read organic chemistry papers,” Ushiku said, “identify which substances are synthesized under what conditions and automatically execute those steps.”

The thinking goes that by having an AI research partner take care of such administrative tasks, actual researchers could complete their work faster and be more productive.

By 2030, the company hopes its AI will have gone one step further and become capable of carrying out the more creative tasks of research.

“In the future,” he said, “maybe an AI could automatically generate a protocol for a new experiment when someone conducts it for the first time.”

By 2050, the program – which is partly funded by a grant from the Japanese government – has the goal to have an AI that conducts large-scale experiments alongside, or even independently of, human scientists.

“Our vision for the year 2050,” Ushiku explained, “is to have AI robots collaborate with human researchers and conduct large-scale experiments on their behalf, producing wonderful research outcomes that might even be worthy of a Nobel Prize.”

And beyond 2050? Currently, Ushiku and his team don’t have any further goals for their AI. But by the time 2100 rolls around, it could well be the case that some of the most seismic scientific achievements of the 21^st century were accomplished with the help of their AI.