Hive Mind: A Game-Changer for Humanity?

Andy Cooper is pictured in a lab setting — Professor Andy Cooper

Professor Andy Cooper

Professor Andy Cooper has been working on automating chemistry at Liverpool for over 20 years. Now, backed by Google.org's AI for Science Fund 2025, he's leading Hive Mind – a project that combines robots, artificial intelligence and hundreds of scientists from around the world to try to find the materials that could reverse climate change

Where is society going to source the materials we need, without burning the planet? It’s a question Professor Andy Cooper has been working on for more than two decades.

Backed by Google.org's AI for Science Fund and based at the University of Liverpool's Materials Innovation Factory, the ambitious Hive Mind project combines autonomous robots, artificial intelligence and the collective expertise of scientists from across the world.

Described by the team as a “physical search engine”, it guides robots through chemical space at speed, steered by AI and human insight working in real time to ask: what materials could capture CO₂ from the air, harvest water, or generate clean electricity at the scale the world needs?

Liverpool's Centre for Materials Discovery – the forerunner of today's Materials Innovation Factory – has been exploring automated chemistry since before AI was part of the conversation.

"We were one of the first groups to be working on robotics and chemistry," says Andy, (Academic Director of the Materials Innovation Factory and Director of Leverhulme Research Centre for Functional Materials Design). That early work has taken on a new dimension as the urgency of the climate challenge has grown and as AI has transformed what's possible.

Hybrid thinking

AI is genuinely powerful at spotting patterns in vast, complex data – the kind of high-dimensional chemical space that would take a human team years to explore. But it has a specific limitation.

"The whole architecture of large language models is, at some level, the next most probable word," Andy says. "So there's a real risk that AI produces the next most obvious research idea." Climate change, he says, is unlikely to yield to the most obvious idea.

Humans, on the other hand, are better at common sense, lateral thinking, and the unexpected connections that shift a field entirely. "We put those two things together," Andy says, "and you might have a hybrid brain that is smarter than the human or the AI by itself."

"The idea is to have a structured system where all opinion – not just the consensus opinion – is taken seriously"

What makes the approach particularly powerful is pace. "If each incremental jump takes a year, it's not going to be very useful," Andy says. "You get to the point where you're making incremental jumps every hour, you do that for six months, and by the end of it you might be somewhere that looks nothing like where you started."

Hive Mind is also designed to consider all ideas. "What tends to happen a lot of times in science is the outliers get ignored just because they're outliers," Andy says. "The idea is to have a structured system where all opinion – not just the consensus opinion – is taken seriously."

"By leveraging AI tools and global collaboration, we can influence a wide range of research programmes – in health, in clean energy – and make sure the knowledge is accessible to all"

A problem that demands a new way of working

Challenges like climate change, Andy says, arguably need scientific cooperation on a scale that hasn't really existed in chemistry before. In fields like particle physics, major papers routinely carry hundreds of authors – because the problem demands it. Andy thinks materials science may need to work the same way.

Once funded, the team was given the freedom to pursue a genuinely pioneering approach: there is no direct parallel for Hive Mind anywhere in the world. Crucially, whatever the team discovers will be open-source – available to researchers globally, accelerating progress far beyond Liverpool:

"By leveraging AI tools and global collaboration, we can influence a wide range of research programmes – in health, in clean energy – and make sure the knowledge is accessible to all."

If it works

These are high-ambition, high-uncertainty projects by design. "That’s what Google.org wanted," Andy says.

What does success look like for the team? In the first instance, a proof of method: demonstrating that scientists from around the world, coordinating through AI and driving experiments via robotics, can move faster toward new discoveries than any of them could alone.

The longer-term ambition is greater: "to develop a scalable material that can help reverse climate change – for example, a new porous material for direct capture of CO₂ from the air. That," Andy says, "would be a game changer for humanity." ●

To find out more about Hive Mind and how you can support this research, visit the Hive Mind page here.

Watch autonomous robots at work in the lab

What is Google.org?

Google.org is Google’s philanthropic arm. It supports nonprofits, universities and other organisations working on some of society’s biggest challenges, combining grant funding with access to technology, research and technical expertise.

Its work focuses on three broad areas: knowledge and skills, stronger communities and scientific progress. Its AI for Science Fund supports ambitious projects using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery and turn research into real-world impact.