Formulating via Apps and AI (S. Abbott)

It will be a few years before we can offload all our formulation tasks to an AGI. So what do we do till then? A few core principles will set us up well for the unfolding future:

• Find the set of known, actionable theories at the core of what you are doing.

• Most products will have a number of such theories, interacting with each other

• If the theories are simple-enough and powerful enough to appify, then appify them

• This will help you identify the relevant parameters and their inter-relationships

• Put the effort in to formulate across a smart range of inputs to obtain a smart range of outputs

• And find someone who loves curating the data, spotting glitches early and identifying big holes in formulation space.

AI can help you on parts of this journey, robots can help to get the data; but if together you put garbage in then all you’ll get out is garbage.