Overview
Speaker: Md. Toyaha Rahman Ratul
Date: Friday, October 2, 2026, 2:30 PM
Room: PM103
The story in short: in 2024, Sakana AI introduced “The AI Scientist,” a system that tries to do the full research cycle by itself. It generates an idea, writes the code, runs the experiments, writes the paper, and even reviews it. In 2025, one paper fully generated by its second version passed peer review at an ICLR workshop, with scores of 6, 7, and 6, which was higher than about 55% of the human-written papers there. The team withdrew the paper before publication, as they had planned with the organizers. In 2026, the work was published in Nature. It has started a big discussion in the community about what AI can and cannot do in research.
Topics Covered
- The story behind the paper: AI Scientist v1, v2, and the Nature paper, plus similar systems such as Zochi (the first AI-written paper accepted at the ACL 2025 main conference).
- Why AI has become this powerful in research now: for example, the fast growth in how long AI agents can work on a task by themselves.
- How automated (agentic) research works: the pipeline of idea generation, literature search, experiments, paper writing, and review, using examples such as The AI Scientist, Google’s AI Co-Scientist, and Kosmos.
- AI in peer review: both the helpful side and the harmful side.
- Where it fails.