Out of the Lab, Into the Code: An Age of AI Scientists?
Description
It sounds promising: AI chatbots acting as scientists, condensing the work of weeks, months, or even years of reading, debate, and hour-long lab meetings into minutes.
Researchers at Stanford University and Google DeepMind have released multi-agent AI “scientist” systems. But how good are they, really, and will they overcome current limitations of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT or Google’s Gemini—such as the lack of robust reasoning capabilities, which are crucial for scientific discovery?
In the 38th episode of the BioRevolution Podcast, Andreas Horchler and Louise von Stechow discuss the promise and the reality of AI scientists.
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References
AI scientists overview
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02241-2
- https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.07.25331008v1
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02028-5
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09403
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02218-z
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01364-w
- https://valutric.com/googles-ai-co-scientist-vs-openais-deep-research-vs-perplexitys-deep-research/
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00343-5
AI scientists
Sakana AI
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02842-3
- https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist-first-publication/
- https://www.wired.com/story/ai-scientist-ubc-lab/
Google’s co-scientist - https://research .google/blog/accelerating-scientific-breakthroughs-with-an-ai-co-scientist/
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18864
DeepResearch - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01485-2
- https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/evaluation-deep-research-performance
- https://modernsciences.org/openai-deep-research-agent-ai-tool-limitations-february-2025/
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00377-9
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.13740
Stanford - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01684-3
Self-driving labs
United States
