Today's AI agents are not designed to extract deep insights from new observations.
Deep Research, information vs. insight, and the nature of science
What AI will accelerate in the scientific process, what it cannot do, and how we can prepare for new manners of scientific investigation.
Science that Compounds: The Need for A New Substrate for Research in the Age of AI
This paper is a perspective from Lightcone Research, an open-source initiative building tooling for scientific research in the age of agentic AI.
AI has supercharged scientists—but may have shrunk science
Analysis of 41 million papers finds that although AI expands individual impact, it narrows collective scientific exploration
AI Isn't as Powerful as We Think | Hannah Fry
Lightcone Research
An open ecosystem for inspectable, composable, and referenceable scientific research in the age of agentic AI.
We're not taking the fact-checking powers of AI seriously enough. It's past time to start.
Some notes on the Nobel Prize hallucination that wasn't
AI is doing something weird to Science
In both good and bad ways, and it won't go away.
How AI Agents are transforming scientific discovery
AI agents are starting to reshape science, from proposing novel hypotheses to writing code. Learn what comes next for scientists and policymakers.
Introduction to Agents
Discover what actually works in AI. Join millions of builders, researchers, and labs evaluating agents, models, and frontier technology through crowdsourced benchmarks, competitions, and hackathons.
Is AI Hiding Its Full Power? With Geoffrey Hinton
The Eternal Sloptember
I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.
The Eternal Sloptember
I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.
AI Is a Waste of Time
The newest AI tools are accelerating basic research and scaring the general public. But many people are simply using them as toys.
AI for science: What can it do? Can it do things? Let’s find out!
A what we’re reading spotlight
