Autonomous AI R&D Runs 'Extremely Dumb Experiments', Researcher Reports
panickssery · x · 2026-11-06
Arjun Panickssery pushes back on the intuition that autonomous AI R&D is ingenious, based on monitoring side projects: a Scrabble engine, an Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe bot, and formalized proofs for an AI philosophy contest. He finds the model's judgment poor in basic ways: it fails to identify obviously key papers when surveying literature, runs experiments with too little training data to distinguish architectures (zero information value), chases trivial directions in the philosophy wiki, and locates but fails to recognize the importance of a clever blog-post idea. Similar patterns observed while judging a hackathon.
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