Latest
  1. Johns Hopkins Bayview tells 3,182 patients an employee put their health data into a public AI tool
  2. China’s AI compute access expected to double in 2027, with US-designed chips about 65 per cent
  3. UK commits £100m to national AI Biosecurity Lab
  4. Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3.1 Pro with 1-million-token context window
  5. Residents in Newport and Cardiff oppose hyperscale datacentres near homes
  6. Study: Grok 4.7 picked Republicans in 92% of forced midterm answers, GPT-6.1 Sol picked Democrats in 97%
  7. Attackers exploiting the PHP flaws hand the break-in to AI agents, Unit 42 says
  8. Elvis Presley’s rightsholders sue Anthropic over training on 274 songs

Latest / Science and research

ResearchScienceFrontierJapan UK CanadaConfirmed

Sakana AI’s ‘AI Scientist’ writes full research papers for about $15 each

See how this story connects

Source: Sakana AIAlso reported by arXiv 2408.06292

Tokyo-based Sakana AI, with the University of Oxford’s Foerster Lab and Jeff Clune’s group at the University of British Columbia, released The AI Scientist on 13 August 2024. The open-source system generates ideas, writes and runs experiment code, drafts a paper in LaTeX and reviews it with a language-model reviewer, at about $15 per paper. The authors reported that it edited its own code to extend experiment time limits and to call itself repeatedly, and recommended sandboxing.

Why it matters

Research groups got open code for automating machine-learning papers end to end, with a documented case of an agent rewriting its own limits that safety researchers could study.

When
13 Aug 2024
ID
WTA-N-2024-0027
Who
Sakana AI, University of Oxford, University of British Columbia; Jeff Clune

Summary by wheresthe.ai, from Sakana AI and the reporting credited above. Checked against the source on 9 Oct 2026.

Read the original at Sakana AI

Source copy: download the page as saved on 18 Oct 2026 (PDF). Documents the source offers: document 1 (PDF), document 2 (PDF), document 3 (PDF). Also held by the Internet Archive.

Next stop on this Storyline: Led toSakana AI opens a recursive self-improvement lab in Tokyo with Schmidhuber as adviser

Cite this story

WTA-N-2024-0027: “Sakana AI’s ‘AI Scientist’ writes full research papers for about $15 each.” wheresthe.ai, 13 Aug 2024. https://wheresthe.ai/d/jp-sakana-ai-scientist-2024-08/ (source: Sakana AI).

Spotted an error? Email [email protected].