Many promising-looking ideas in AI research fail to deliver, but their validation takes substantial human labor and compute. Predicting an idea's chance of success is thus crucial for accelerating empirical AI research, a skill that even expert researchers can only acquire through substantial experience. We build the first benchmark for this task and compare LMs with human experts. Concretely, given two research ideas (e.g., two jailbreaking methods), we aim to predict which will perform better on a set of benchmarks. We scrape ideas and experimental results from conference papers, yielding 1,585 human-verified idea pairs published after our base model's cut-off date for testing, and 6,000 pairs for training. We then develop a system that combines a fine-tuned GPT-4.1 with a paper retrieval agent, and we recruit 25 human experts to compare with. In the NLP domain, our system beats human experts by a large margin (64.4% v.s. 48.9%). On the full test set, our system achieves 77% accuracy, while off-the-shelf frontier LMs like o3 perform no better than random guessing, even with the same retrieval augmentation. We verify that our system does not exploit superficial features like idea complexity through extensive human-written and LM-designed robustness tests. Finally, we evaluate our system on unpublished novel ideas, including ideas generated by an AI ideation agent. Our system achieves 63.6% accuracy, demonstrating its potential as a reward model for improving idea generation models. Altogether, our results outline a promising new direction for LMs to accelerate empirical AI research.

Complex chemical space and limited knowledge scope with biases holds immense challenge for human scientists, yet in automated materials discovery. Existing intelligent methods relies more on numerical computation, leading to inefficient exploration and results with hard-interpretability. To bridge this gap, we introduce a principles-guided material discovery system powered by language inferential multi-agent system (MAS), namely PriM. Our framework integrates automated hypothesis generation with experimental validation in a roundtable system of MAS, enabling systematic exploration while maintaining scientific rigor. Based on our framework, the case study of nano helix demonstrates higher materials exploration rate and property value while providing transparent reasoning pathways. This approach develops an automated-and-transparent paradigm for material discovery, with broad implications for rational design of functional materials. Code is publicly available at our \href{https://github.com/amair-lab/PriM}{GitHub}.

As AI promises to accelerate scientific discovery, it remains unclear whether fully AI-driven research is possible and whether it can adhere to key scientific values, such as transparency, traceability and verifiability. Mimicking human scientific practices, we built data-to-paper, an automation platform that guides interacting LLM agents through a complete stepwise research process, while programmatically back-tracing information flow and allowing human oversight and interactions. In autopilot mode, provided with annotated data alone, data-to-paper raised hypotheses, designed research plans, wrote and debugged analysis codes, generated and interpreted results, and created complete and information-traceable research papers. Even though research novelty was relatively limited, the process demonstrated autonomous generation of de novo quantitative insights from data. For simple research goals, a fully-autonomous cycle can create manuscripts which recapitulate peer-reviewed publications without major errors in about 80-90%, yet as goal complexity increases, human co-piloting becomes critical for assuring accuracy. Beyond the process itself, created manuscripts too are inherently verifiable, as information-tracing allows to programmatically chain results, methods and data. Our work thereby demonstrates a potential for AI-driven acceleration of scientific discovery while enhancing, rather than jeopardizing, traceability, transparency and verifiability.

A major challenge in both neuroscience and machine learning is the development of useful tools for understanding complex information processing systems. One such tool is probes, i.e., supervised models that relate features of interest to activation patterns arising in biological or artificial neural networks. Neuroscience has paved the way in using such models through numerous studies conducted in recent decades. In this work, we draw insights from neuroscience to help guide probing research in machine learning. We highlight two important design choices for probes - direction and expressivity - and relate these choices to research goals.

Creating an autonomous system to make scientific discoveries at a Nobel Prize level by 2050. With the system, AI would formulate hypotheses from enormous amounts of existing experimental data, and robots would conduct experiments to prove them. Achieving artificial hibernation technology by 2050, to help extend healthy human life spans.

In the near term I see greater prosperity and reduced mortality due to things like highway accidents and medical errors, where there's a huge loss of life today.

Many experts believe that in the coming decades, artificial intelligence will change, and perhaps significantly reduce, the demand for human labor in the economy, but there remains much uncertainty about the accuracy of this claim and what to do about it. This paper identifies several ways in which the artificial intelligence community can help society to anticipate and shape such outcomes in a socially beneficial direction. First, different technical aspirations for the field of AI may be associated with different social outcomes, increasing the stakes of decisions made in the AI community. Second, the extent of researchers' efforts to apply AI to different social and economic domains will influence the distribution of cognition between humans and machines in those domains. Third, the AI community can play a key role in initiating a more nuanced and inclusive public discussion of the social and economic possibilities afforded by AI technologies. To pave the way for such dialogue, we suggest a line of research aimed at better understanding the nature, pace, and drivers of progress in AI in order to more effectively anticipate and shape AI's role in society.