ai-research
Frontier agents produced three genuinely new ideas out of 252 attempts News
A systematic evaluation of seven frontier models on 36 long-horizon research tasks found that agents behave like engineering optimizers rather than researchers, with only a handful of solutions surviving manual review as genuinely novel and more of them turning out to be shortcuts aimed at the evaluator.
Greenblatt puts his median at five years of progress in one News
Redwood Research's Ryan Greenblatt told Dwarkesh Patel that once AI matches top human AI researchers the feedback loop could compress four or five years of progress into a single year, and that what models still lack is not deep insight but hands-on experimental taste.
Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to build an AI that runs the experiments itself News
Alphabet announced on August 5 that Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le are leaving to found Discovery Loop, a startup betting that thousands of parallel automated experiments beat the human research loop, while Demis Hassabis hands off day-to-day control of Google DeepMind.
NeurIPS rebuttal week ended with authors, reviewers and chairs all reporting the same silence News
The NeurIPS 2026 author discussion window closed on 3 August with multiple independent reports of reviewers and area chairs never responding to rebuttals, in a cycle the conference redesigned specifically to make that discussion consequential.