Abstract:In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved numerous disruptive breakthroughs in frontier scientific and technological fields, such as AlphaFold2 for protein structure prediction, intelligent control of nuclear fusion, and drug design for COVID-19. These achievements indicate that AI for Science is becoming a new paradigm in research. To achieve fundamental scientific innovation and major technological breakthroughs in the era of intelligence, two core issues should be addressed: 1) how to harness the generality and creativity of the new-generation of AI, especially generative AI and large language models (LLMs), to promote the formation of new paradigms; 2) how to empower and transform traditional scientific facilities using AI. To tackle these challenges, this study proposes a concept of AI-enabled scientific facility (AISF) that caters to the requirements of both establishment of totally new intelligent scientific facility and AI empowerment of existing scientific facilities. It aims to construct an infrastructure system for AI for Science, enabling innovative functionalities such as scientific large language models (LLMs), generative simulation and inversion, autonomous intelligent unmanned experiments, and large-scale trustworthy scientific collaboration. These advancements will accelerate scientific discoveries, synthesis of transformative materials, and application of related engineering technologies.