Zochi's achievement is NOT the first AI-driven scientific research platform.
Last year, Llion Jones, one of the original creators behind the Transformer architecture, founded Sakana AI and launched an automated research platform straightforwardly named "AI Scientist", which has already evolved to its 2nd generation.
Interestingly, a paper produced by AI Scientist v2 also passed peer review at this year's ICLR workshop on ICBINB, receiving scores of 6/7/6. However, it's important to consider that workshop acceptance criteria typically differ from those of the main ICLR conference, with acceptance rates for workshops being roughly two to three times higher.
Despite their acceptance, controversy around AI-driven research persists. Even successful AI-generated papers face the risk of being withdrawn before formal publication due to ongoing academic debate. For example, Intology (the creators behind Zochi) acknowledged that "AI should not be credited as an author in academic work and are currently discussing with workshop organizers whether and how these results should be presented to the research community".
Furthermore, according to internal assessments by Sakana using main-conference-level standards, the AI Scientist-v2 paper failed to meet acceptance criteria. This aligns with Intology’s own NeurIPS-based automated evaluation, which gave AI Scientist-v2 an average score below 4 that is actually worse than its predecessor.
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Zochi's performance clearly outshines that of AI Scientist-v2, yet whether its research would succeed at the main conference level remains to be seen, I believe. Due to ongoing controversies surrounding AI-driven research within academia, even if accepted, research teams might withdraw their papers before formal publication.
Intology has explicitly stated that, "in the interest of preserving academic integrity, they agree AI should not be listed as an author on scholarly works". Currently, they are in discussions with workshop organizers to determine whether these AI-generated findings should be presented publicly.
