An 'AI Scientist' Is Inventing and Running Its Own Experiments

At first glance, a recent batch of research papers produced by a prominent artificial intelligence lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver might not seem that notable. Featuring incremental improvements on existing algorithms and ideas, they read like the contents of a middling AI conference or journal. But the research is, in fact, remarkable. That's because it's entirely the work of an "AI scientist" developed at the UBC lab together with researchers from the University of Oxford and a startup called Sakana AI. The project demonstrates an early step toward what might prove a revolutionary trick: letting AI learn by inventing and exploring novel ideas.