AI picking experiments can be misled by its own predictions, warns AI-for-Science writer
bravo_abad · x · 2026-10-01
In his Substack Discovery at Scale, AI-for-Science practitioner Jorge Bravo Abad highlights a counterintuitive risk in autonomous scientific discovery: an AI choosing the next experiment may favor a candidate simply because its own model overestimates its performance, and searching more possibilities can amplify that error.
He illustrates this with Stratego, a two-player board game where opposing piece identities are hidden — a setting where decisions depend on self-generated predictions, creating a self-reinforcing misjudgment loop. The takeaway: broader search doesn't mean more reliable discovery, a warning directly relevant to the design of autonomous "AI scientist" systems.
Related event: Search Can Amplify AI Self-Deception, Study Warns(2 posts)→
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