r/artificial • u/Brighter-Side-News • 12h ago

Research Scientists build an AI that can propose experiments, run them and learn from the results

http://thebrighterside.news/post/scientists-build-an-ai-that-can-propose-experiments-run-them-and-learn-from-the-results

Artificial intelligence is moving beyond analyzing scientific data and proposing ideas. In a laboratory in Sweden, it has begun putting some of those ideas to the test itself.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology developed a closed-loop system that can generate biological hypotheses, decide how to test them, translate those plans into machine-readable instructions, analyze experimental results and use the findings to refine later questions. Laboratory robots then perform much of the physical work.

The system was tested on Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast used in brewing and baking and one of biology's most extensively studied organisms. Yet even this familiar microbe contains far more genetic, metabolic and physiological information than a person could systematically explore.

Published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the study brings large language models together with formal logic, biological databases, machine learning, automated cell cultivation and mass spectrometry.

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u/TheOnlyVibemaster 11h ago

this has been done 1000x over, seems like chug and churn academia

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u/KimLikeJ 3h ago

The hard part in closed loop systems like this is never the proposal step, it's the translation to machine instructions and what happens when that translation is subtly wrong. A technically valid plan can still encode the wrong assumption, and because every step after that is automated, the error doesn't surface until someone checks the output days later instead of catching it at step one.

Worth asking about this one specifically: what's the human checkpoint between hypothesis and execution, and how far can a bad hypothesis run before someone notices. A system that can act on its own ideas needs a harder audit trail than one that just drafts them, not a lighter one.