‘AI Scientist’, created by a team at Tokyo company Sakana AI and at academic labs in Canada and the United Kingdom, performs the full cycle of research from reading the existing literature on a problem and formulating hypothesis for new developments to trying out solutions and writing a paper. AI Scientist even does some of the job of peer reviewers and evaluates its own results.

AI Scientist joins a slew of efforts to create AI agents that have automated at least parts of the scientific process. “To my knowledge, no one has yet done the total scientific community, all in one system,” says AI Scientist co-creator Cong Lu, a machine-learning researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The results1 were posted on the arXiv preprint server this month.

“It’s impressive that they’ve done this end-to-end,” says Jevin West, a computational social scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “And I think we should be playing around with these ideas, because there could be potential for helping science.”