Autonomous AI systems are those systems that can be given a goal - or in some cases, develop their own goals - and then put into place a process for executing the steps necessary to achieve those goals.
Example: Coscientist
...the AI Coscientist consists of modules that: assist literature searching to work out synthetic pathways and decide on experimental protocols; write code to enable communication between the modules; and search hardware documentation so that robots can be triggered to carry out experiments remotely.
Figure: Coscientist, a semi-autonomous AI system, automates chemistry tasks using large language models to respond to human prompts, including synthesising molecules and programming robots for experiments. It learns from reaction outcomes, suggesting protocol improvements in an iterative process to optimise chemical reactions (Boiko, et al., 2023).
- Boiko, D. A., MacKnight, R., Kline, B., & Gomes, G. (2023). Autonomous chemical research with large language models. Nature, 624, 570–578. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06792-0