Sakana claims its AI-generated paper passed peer review — but it’s a bit more nuanced than that

Japanese startup Sakana said that its AI generated the first peer-reviewed scientific publication. But while the claim isn’t untrue, there are significant caveats to note. The debate swirling around AI and its role in the scientific process grows fiercer by the day. Many researchers don’t believe AI is quite ready to serve as a “co-scientist,” while others think that there’s potential — but acknowledge it’s early days. Sakana falls into the latter camp. The company said that it used an AI system called The AI Scientist-v2 to generate a paper that Sakana then submitted to a workshop at ICLR, a long-running and reputable AI conference. Sakana claims that the workshop’s organizers, as well as ICLR’s leadership, had agreed to work with the company to conduct an experiment to double-blind review AI-generated manuscripts. Sakana said it collaborated with researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oxford to submit three AI-generated papers to the aforementione ... Read full article.