Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi first proposes "selection science": how to make the right choices in the era of AI-created matter

AI's powerful creative capacity is enabling humanity to transition from an era of scarcity to an era of material abundance. How can we make the right choices and find the optimal path among trillions of possibilities? In the future, "making scientific choices" will develop into a "science of choice." On the morning of October 31, at the keynote forum of the opening ceremony of the 2026 World Laureates Forum, Omar M. Yaghi, winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Xinghua Distinguished Chair Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Department of Chemical Engineering at Tsinghua University, and foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, delivered a keynote speech titled "Toward a Science of Choice for AI and Humanity," proposing the concept of a "science of choice" for the first time. One of the intellectual cores of the future AI field "The science of choice is about wisely choosing among many possibilities." Yaghi said he hopes the "science of choice" can become one of the intellectual cores of the AI field. "I grew up in an era of material scarcity; now AI can generate tens of thousands of materials," Yaghi said, noting that humanity has transitioned from an era of scarcity to an era of material abundance. For scientists, two things will truly matter in the future: first, the quality of our questions, and second, the ability to choose—to make the right choices from infinite possibilities. Yaghi believes that choice may develop into a science—making choices based on facts and verifying those choices through science. Intuition and experience are unreliable; choices must be based on science Yaghi used his own chemistry research as an example to illustrate the importance of the science of choice. He began research on reticular metals in 2005. This structure makes it convenient for chemists to capture or separate molecules, and allows for more precise design of material molecules and adjustment of their functions—when scientists add different functional groups to reticular molecules, the resulting molecules possess almost endless possibilities. So, faced with a vast number of possibilities, how do we choose? In the past, people often chose through intuition and experience, but that is often wrong—this is common in human endeavors—whereas scientific choices should be based on facts obtained through observation. Yaghi gave an example: a certain material can be used to capture carbon dioxide, and it must maintain stable performance over a timescale of decades for long-term use in real environments. "This may be the world's best carbon dioxide capture material, made by one of my graduate students at Tsinghua University," he said. This material was selected from 10 to the 3000th power possibilities. But this choice was not based on experience; it was based on science. "This is the power that choice brings us." We also found a metal MOF material that, without energy input and with only light, can capture water in the desert, and the water collected is very pure, clean, and drinkable. This was also made by my student. We have already sold the first commercial device; the current prototype device in California, USA, needs only to be connected to a solar cell to produce 1,000 liters of water per day. Interdisciplinary choices require the "science of choice" even more How can we make scientific choices? Yaghi believes that choices must always be based on facts. Especially in interdisciplinary research, scientific choice is even more important. For example, one project in Yaghi's laboratory uses GPT to design various conditions to enable covalent organic materials to crystallize, thereby giving the materials more practical properties—human researchers generally find it difficult to associate knowledge outside their own field, whereas large models may be able to take into account material properties and conditions from other fields as well. In the end, after several rounds of iteration, the large model proposed 96 conditions, and the resulting material's crystallization performance was three times that achieved by years of past work! Scientific choice will also greatly accelerate research and commercialization. Yaghi said that in his laboratory, students may need to choose a direction among 10 fields, including materials science and physics. "But their choices are not based on intuition and experience," he said. "Can we connect these fields and discover new rules and principles to help us make better choices based on purpose and evidence? This may greatly accelerate the research process and also accelerate the subsequent commercialization process."