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Seven Thoughts on "AI Scientists"

corinwagen.github.io · 4,744 words · saved by 1 readers

Last week I had the privilege of attending the 2025 Progress Conference, which brought together a diverse cadre of people working on progress, metascience, artificial intelligence, and related fields. I was surprised by how optimistic the median attendee was about AI for science. While some people inside science have been excited about the possibilities of AI for a while, I didn’t expect that representatives of frontier labs or think tanks would expect scientific progress to be the biggest near-term consequence of AI. At this point it’s obvious that AI will affect science in many ways. To name just a few: All of the above feel inevitable to me—even if all fundamental AI progress halted, it is virtually inevitable that we would see significant and impactful progress in each of these areas for years to come. Here I instead want to focus on the more speculative idea of “AI scientists,” or agentic AI systems capable of some independent and autonomous scientific exploration. After having a

Seven Thoughts on "AI Scientists" Corin Wagen About Projects --> Past Work --> Papers Blog (Archive) Seven Thoughts on "AI Scientists" October 21, 2025 The Vision of The Valley of The Dry Bones , Gustave Doré (1866) Last week I had the privilege of attending the 2025 Progress Conference , which brought together a diverse cadre of people working on progress, metascience, artificial intelligence, and related fields. I was surprised by how optimistic the median attendee was about AI for science. While some people inside science have been excited about the possibilities of AI for a while, I didn’t

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