By Jacek Krywko
Publication Date: 2026-03-27 13:00:00
SScience has always relied on the mind of a curious person to formulate a hypothesis, design an experiment, analyze the results, and present the case to that person’s colleagues. Over the centuries we have built better tools like electron microscopes, particle accelerators and supercomputers, but the core cycle of scientific discovery has remained stubbornly human. Now this loop begins for the first time with a new way of thinking.
Until now, scientists have often relied on artificial intelligence to help them solve a predefined, narrow task like folding proteins, says Jeff Clune, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia. “We are saying that AI will be the scientist,” he says.
In a current one Nature In one study, Clune and his colleagues introduced the AI Scientist, an AI system that, without human involvement, wrote a paper that passed peer review for a workshop at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025, a premier venue in the field of…