OpenAI research agents

This is a research demonstration from OpenAI, PerturbAI and Scripps Research of "distributed biological reasoning": thousands of AI agents powered by GPT-Rosalind split up the analysis of a whole-brain CRISPR perturbation atlas covering millions of mouse brain cells. Each agent took one gene disruption, analyzed the cellular responses, searched the scientific literature and proposed mechanistic explanations. The individual reports were merged into a "reasoning atlas" linking genes, cell effects, publications and possible mechanisms.

According to OpenAI, the run took 32 minutes, whereas comparable human analysis done one perturbation at a time was estimated at months to a year. The agents reproduced findings from human analyses and added further leads, and their novelty and value assessments aligned with blinded human experts. Reported leads include a difference between Tsc1 and Tsc2 in cerebellar neurons and a possible link between cholesterol regulation and neurodegeneration. In a fixed-model, fixed-resource comparison, a single agent cited only 11 references at the largest workload, versus more than 700 for the distributed agents, and human experts preferred the distributed interpretations.

This is a published study and dataset, not a packaged product. The reasoning atlas is made available for researchers to explore. The outputs are hypotheses that still need laboratory testing. GPT-Rosalind, the underlying model, is referenced but its access terms are not described in the provided material.