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. 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. “But they seem like pretty cool ideas that somebody might try.” As amazing as today’s AI programs can be, they are limited by their need to consume human-generated training data. If AI programs can instead learn in an open-ended fashion, by experimenting and exploring “interesting” ideas, they might unlock capabilities that extend beyond anything humans have shown them. Another recent project from Clune’s lab used this approach to let AI programs dream up the code that allows virtual characters to do all sorts of things within a Roblox-like world.