By Muvija M

LONDON, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Google has developed an AI

tool to act as a virtual collaborator for biomedical scientists,

the U.S. blue chip said on Wednesday.

The new tool, tested by scientists at Stanford University in

the U.S. and Imperial College London, uses advanced reasoning to

help scientists synthesize vast amounts of literature and

generate novel hypotheses, the company said.

AI is being increasingly deployed in the workplace, from

answering calls to carrying out legal research, following the

success of ChatGPT and similar models over the past year.

Google's AI unit, DeepMind, has made science a priority, and

DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis was a co-recipient of a Nobel Prize

in Chemistry last year for technology developed in the AI unit.

In an experiment on liver fibrosis, Google said all the

approaches suggested by its new AI co-scientist showed promising

activity and potential to inhibit causes of disease.

It showed the capacity to improve solutions generated by

experts over time, Google added.

"While this is a preliminary finding requiring further

validation, it suggests a promising avenue for capable AI

systems... to augment and accelerate the work of expert

scientists," it said.

The scientists who worked on the project said it would

complement rather than replace researchers.

"We expect that it will... increase, rather than decrease

scientific collaboration," Google scientist Vivek Natarajan

said.