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. A new class of models, which can be summarized under the term general-purpose models (GPMs) such as large language models, has 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 and emerging 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.
@article{arxiv.2507.07456,
title = {General-Purpose Models for the Chemical Sciences: LLMs and Beyond},
author = {Nawaf Alampara and Anagha Aneesh and Martiño Ríos-García and Adrian Mirza and Mara Schilling-Wilhelmi and Ali Asghar Aghajani and Meiling Sun and Gordan Prastalo and Kevin Maik Jablonka},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.07456},
year = {2025}
}