In August 2024, a team of machine-learning researchers launched the first ever artificial-intelligence tool that aimed to fully automate the scientific process. 'AI scientist', created by Sakana AI, a company based in Tokyo, can perform the full cycle of scientific discovery, from idea generation to testing its ideas to writing them up in a scientific paper. Almost two years on, there are many different AI research assistants available for researchers to use, and a few of them are designed to do autonomous research in the same way that AI Scientist does. Now, AI Scientist is thought to be one of the first such tools to go through the peer-review process at a leading academic journal. The paper, published today in Nature1, updates a 2024 preprint that described the tool2, including by toning down its reported capabilities. The latest paper also describes how AI Scientist submitted three original research papers generated by the tool to a leading machine-learning conference, one of...
learn more
