General purpose models for the chemical sciences
This addresses the problem of leveraging limited and varied data in chemical sciences for researchers, but it is incremental as it reviews existing applications rather than introducing new methods.
The paper reviews general-purpose models (GPMs) like large language models, which tackle the challenge of diverse, small, and fuzzy datasets in chemical sciences by enabling flexible task-solving with low data requirements, though many applications are still in the prototype phase.
Data-driven techniques have a large potential to transform and accelerate the chemical sciences. However, chemical sciences also pose the unique challenge of very diverse, small, fuzzy datasets that are difficult to leverage in conventional machine learning approaches completely. A new class of models, general-purpose models (GPMs) such as large language models, have shown the ability to solve tasks they have not been directly trained on, and to flexibly operate with low amounts of data in different formats. In this review, we discuss fundamental building principles of GPMs and review recent applications of those models in the chemical sciences across the entire scientific process. While many of these applications are still in the prototype phase, we expect that the increasing interest in GPMs will make many of them mature in the coming years.