[Linkpost] 'The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery'

post by Bogdan Ionut Cirstea (bogdan-ionut-cirstea) · 2024-08-15T21:32:59.979Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

This is a link post for https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292

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Authors: Chris Lu, Cong Lu, Robert Tjarko Lange, Jakob Foerster, Jeff Clune, David Ha.

Blogpost: https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/. 

Abstract:

One of the grand challenges of artificial general intelligence is developing agents capable of conducting scientific research and discovering new knowledge. While frontier models have already been used as aids to human scientists, e.g. for brainstorming ideas, writing code, or prediction tasks, they still conduct only a small part of the scientific process. This paper presents the first comprehensive framework for fully automatic scientific discovery, enabling frontier large language models to perform research independently and communicate their findings. We introduce The AI Scientist, which generates novel research ideas, writes code, executes experiments, visualizes results, describes its findings by writing a full scientific paper, and then runs a simulated review process for evaluation. In principle, this process can be repeated to iteratively develop ideas in an open-ended fashion, acting like the human scientific community. We demonstrate its versatility by applying it to three distinct subfields of machine learning: diffusion modeling, transformer-based language modeling, and learning dynamics. Each idea is implemented and developed into a full paper at a cost of less than $15 per paper. To evaluate the generated papers, we design and validate an automated reviewer, which we show achieves near-human performance in evaluating paper scores. The AI Scientist can produce papers that exceed the acceptance threshold at a top machine learning conference as judged by our automated reviewer. This approach signifies the beginning of a new era in scientific discovery in machine learning: bringing the transformative benefits of AI agents to the entire research process of AI itself, and taking us closer to a world where endless affordable creativity and innovation can be unleashed on the world's most challenging problems. Our code is open-sourced at this https URL.

I think this is important as a proof of concept for the feasibility of and for what automated ML research (including e.g. prosaic alignment research) could look like in the near future. 

I plan to write a separate post with thoughts on the paper and its implications.

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comment by anaguma · 2024-08-15T22:35:35.600Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

A particularly notable section (pg. 19):

“The current implementation of The AI Scientist has minimal direct sandboxing in the code, leading to several unexpected and sometimes undesirable outcomes if not appropriately guarded against. For example, in one run, The AI Scientist wrote code in the experiment file that initiated a system call to relaunch itself, causing an uncontrolled increase in Python processes and eventually necessitating manual intervention. In another run, The AI Scientist edited the code to save a checkpoint for every update step, which took up nearly a terabyte of storage. In some cases, when The AI Scientist's experiments exceeded our imposed time limits, it attempted to edit the code to extend the time limit arbitrarily instead of trying to shorten the runtime. While creative, the act of bypassing the experimenter's imposed constraints has potential implications for AI safety (Lehman et al., 2020).​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​”