The paper "AI in Science: Early Insights" analyzes AI’s impact on scientific work using data from 15 million Gemini interactions, 2,600 specialized AI models, and a survey of 600 scientists. It finds widespread AI adoption, complementary use of large language models and specialized tools, significant productivity gains of about seven hours per week, and a shift in research bottlenecks toward hypothesis backlog and verification needs. The study suggests AI can boost scientific productivity but its full effect depends on addressing new downstream challenges.
By Mihai Codreanu, Alex Imas, Juan Mateos-Garcia, Joseph Emmens, Evalyne Muiruri, Arthur Turrell, Julian Jacobs, Atoosa Kasirzadeh, Ana Trisovic, Yiyuan Chen, Tanya Rodchenko, Catherine Pollard, Scott Strand, Daniel Rock, Zanna Iscenko, Fabien Curto Millet, Neil Thompson, James Manyika
arXiv:2606. 13566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current discussions of AI in scientific discovery are often dominated by two visible capabilities: search over existing knowledge and execution through optimization, simulation, and automation.
By Guojun Liao
arXiv:2606. 01316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery demands intelligence, perseverance, and serendipity across vast search spaces.
By Zhe Zhao, Haibin Wen, Yingcheng Wu, Jiaming Ma, Yifan Wen, Jinglin Jian, Jiacheng Ge, Xiangru Tang, Bo An, Ming Yin, Sanfeng Wu, Mengdi Wang, Le Cong
The paper introduces ScientistTwo, a fully autonomous multi‑agent framework that takes a scientific problem, establishes baselines, generates hypotheses, and coordinates specialized agents to conduct an end‑to‑end discovery cycle without human intervention. It rigorously tests and refines its methods through automated experiments, ablation studies, and a closed‑loop peer‑review engine. Benchmarking against top conferences (ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS) shows that ScientistTwo produces expert‑level, publishable papers and codebases that outperform human state‑of‑the‑art models and receive higher review ratings under automated AI review.
By Jaehyun Nam, Jinsung Yoon, Yanzhou Pan, Yubo Wang, Rui Meng, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Tomas Pfister
arXiv:2608. 03569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarking the ability of AI scientists to generate novel ideas is notoriously difficult.
By William Bolton, Philip Torr
arXiv:2609.07611v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Scientific ideation is the capacity to formulate novel and testable hypotheses from scientific evidence, and autonomous AI scientists depend on it. Exi...
By Yunxiang Mo, Tianshi Zheng, Yisen Gao, Rui Wang, Newt Nguyen Kim Hue Nam, Kelvin Kiu Wai Tam, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Wong, Simon See
arXiv:2606. 08532v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern artificial intelligence excels at prediction but cannot explain.
By Lei Lin, Xinlong Pan, Ronghao Wang, Chunbao Zhou, Jue Wang, Yangang Wang, Ivana Rasovska
The paper "The AI-Enabled Scientific Frontier" analyzes 2,507 head‑to‑head comparisons of AI versus other scientific methods across 27 disciplines from 2000 to early 2025. It finds that AI often outperforms traditional statistics but at higher computational cost, while in about a quarter of cases AI is both more expensive and less effective. Compared to scientific computing, AI usually underperforms but at lower cost, though since 2020 its performance has improved, now surpassing computing in over half of the comparisons.
By Gabriel Manso, Emma Fu, Neil Thompson
arXiv:2606. 12683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over the last decade, building human-level artificial general intelligence has moved from far-fetched speculation to being a concrete next-decade target for many of the largest AI organisations.
By Tim Genewein, Matija Franklin, Alexander Lerchner, Laurent Orseau, Samuel Albanie, Adam Bales, Cole Wyeth, Stephanie Chan, Iason Gabriel, Joel Z. Leibo, Allan Dafoe, Marcus Hutter, Thore Graepel, Shane Legg
ASI‑Bench is a new benchmark that evaluates AI systems on their ability to conduct innovative exploration and autonomous scientific research across 11 domains, using 60 project‑level tasks. It progressively removes human methodological guidance to test whether AI can independently select methods, execute research, and produce verifiable results. Results from 18 state‑of‑the‑art agent–model configurations show a sharp performance drop when guidance is reduced, indicating current systems still rely heavily on human input.
By Junwei Zhou, Zhen Sun, Binyu Li, Jiangyu Zhou, Yuexi Pan, Hengyu Wang, Honghe Ren, Xiaohan Jia, Xueyang Zhou, Xiaoyu Cao, Yongchao Chen, Yuanning Feng, Junhao Wu, Cheng Zhang, Sijia Chen, Haoyu Xue, Chengsong You, Huan Wang, Koutian Wu, Peigan Gao, Jiakun Wu, Wenzhe Li, Ergan Shang, Qingyuan Zheng, Jingjing Zhou, Ruixuan Jia, Yan Xu, Hongrui Zhang, Xiao-Han Ma, Zhengxiang Cheng, Yuexing Hao, Liting Mai, Xianglin Ji, Wenjun Zhang, Zhuofan Chen, Yixiao Huang, Chi Wang, Wenyue Hua, Yilun Hao, Yuantao Zhai, Ziyan Zhao, Jingyan Xie
arXiv:2605. 22681v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI systems are increasingly used to support forward-looking scientific judgment, but it remains unclear whether they can form reliable expectations about future scientific advances.
By Sean Wu, Pan Lu, Yupeng Chen, Jonathan Bragg, Yutaro Yamada, Peter Clark, David Clifton, Philip Torr, James Zou, Junchi Yu
arXiv:2606. 08251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bold projections that artificial intelligence will accelerate scientific discovery have raced ahead of evidence from working scientists, and the field still lacks large-scale, scientist-in-the-loop tests of these claims.
By Honglin Bao, Siyang Wu, Xiao Liu, Sida Li, Shiyun Cao, James A. Evans