A new artificial-intelligence tool quickly transforms a research paper into a bespoke AI agent that serves as a 'virtual corresponding author'. The agent can respond immediately to questions about the paper, providing a convenient way for scientists to grasp advances in unfamiliar fields. It can also apply the paper's methods to a fresh data set and even collaborate autonomously with agents for papers from other scientific disciplines. The ability of this tool, called Paper2Agent, to convert static papers into dynamic sources of information 'can help us to reimagine what knowledge looks like in the future', says James Zou, a computer scientist at Stanford University in California and co-author of the paper, which was published today in Nature1. Agents are AI assistants that can reason and carry out complex tasks. The Paper2Agent tool starts by accessing a paper's main text, code, data sets and other elements. The information is deposited onto a digital platform called an MCP server....
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