Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi, now a chaired professor at Tsinghua University, has highlighted the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific research.
Yaghi, who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said in an interview with China Media Group (CMG) that AI accelerates the pace of discovery and is poised to redefine how fundamental research unfolds.
"It certainly will, not only will AI facilitate and speed up the discovery, but also, it will help us identify which materials are going to be better, cheaper and in the fullness of time, greener. Now, once you've done that, by that time, AI will be presenting us with new questions that we wouldn't have thought about. And science is all about questions. It's all about figuring out what is that important question," said Yaghi.
The essence of progress, Yaghi noted, is about posing the most significant and relevant questions, and in this, AI serves as a powerful tool.
"It's about asking the right question. And so AI will help us ask questions, the right questions, hopefully, that we otherwise would not have thought of asking. We see something we inquire about it. We try to see how it could be used to benefit. And in so doing you've collected data and knowledge and that knowledge helps you solve problems. And so AI is going to help us do that a lot faster, a lot better than we've ever done this before," said Yaghi.
AI accelerates pace of scientific discovery: Nobel laureate
