Founded as an academic discipline in 1956, artificial intelligence needed more than six decades to properly take off. In 2012, deep learning marked a huge step forward, followed by the transformer architecture, which arrived half a decade later. This market sector is now going through a very fast growth, and the rate continues to accelerate. A recently developed system could speed things up even more, thanks to its ability to perform autonomous scientific research.

The AI Scientist is a system that was conceived by researchers from Sakana AI (Japan) alongside people from the University of Oxford and the University of British Columbia. While the usual scientific research tasks are very slow and involve humans with their inherent limitations, this AI system uses LLMs to get these tasks done and obviously has no problems working 24/7. For now, the research conducted by The AI Scientist is limited to finding new methods to improve itself. According to its creators, it is already capable of delivering papers good enough to comply with the requirements of academic research.

In the near future, once the project mentioned above turns into a market-ready product, it could help speed up research for curing cancer, tackling climate change, or even understanding dark matter and gravity. Those interested in the risks that AI in general can pose to humanity should read Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar's The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma, which can be found on Amazon as an audiobook, Kindle e-book, paperback, or hardcover.