Ziming Liu Maps Six Bets on Auto-Research, From Explicit to Tacit Knowledge
CatAstro_Piyush · x · 2026-11-02
MIT's Ziming Liu publishes "Six Bets on Auto-Research," a philosophical framework for automated scientific research. He argues research as a modality can be analyzed along two dimensions — whether it can be made explicit and whether it can be externalized. Bet 1 (already mainstream): research has largely been externalized into papers, math, and code, so LLMs that master these symbol spaces may produce new science by combining and searching. The six bets map to distinct technical routes depending on whether research knowledge can be externalized at all.
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