Can AI do AI Research?

AI research can be carried out entirely within digital spaces, making it ripe for automation. Recent efforts have demonstrated that AI systems are capable of carrying out the whole process of research from ideation to publishing. Startup Sakana.ai has created an 'AI Scientist' that independently chooses research topics, conducts experiments, and publishes complete papers showing its results. While the quality of this work is still only comparable to an early-stage researcher, things will only improve from here.

Judging Social Situations

AI chatbots, including Claude and Microsoft Copilot, can outperform humans in evaluating social situations. In an established 'Situational Judgment Test', these AI systems consistently selected more effective responses than human participants.

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Analyzing Scientific Literature

While language models are known to hallucinate information, this tendency can be reduced. PaperQA2, an LLM optimized to reliably provide factual information, was able to match or exceed human subject matter experts across a range of realistic literature review tasks. The summary articles it produced were found to be more accurate than those written by human authors.

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Writing Emotive Poetry

A study has shown that non-expert readers can no longer tell AI-authored poems from those written by acclaimed human poets. The AI poems were also rated higher in rhythm and beauty.

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Writing Post-surgical Operative Reports

Surgeons take painstaking notes of the actions they carry out during surgeries, collecting them into narrative form as an 'operative report'. A machine vision system was trained to watch surgery footage and produce such reports. It did so with higher accuracy (and much higher speed) than human authors.

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Developing New Algorithms

AIs can find innovative solutions to difficult coding problems when given an appropriate framing. For example, a dedicated system called AlphaDev was trained to play a game about creating sorting algorithms. The algorithms it discovered were novel and outperformed existing human-authored benchmarks.

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Who is Building AGI?

The following companies have explicitly stated they intend to develop AGI, either through public statements or in response to FLI’s 2024 AI Safety Index survey:

Anthropic

OpenAI

Google DeepMind

Meta

x.AI

Zhipu AI

Alibaba

DeepSeek

How can we avoid AGI?

There are policies we can implement to avoid some of the dangers of rapid power seeking through AI. They include:

Compute accounting
Standardized tracking and verification of AI computational power usage

Compute caps
Hard limits on computational power for AI systems, enforced through law and hardware

Enhanced liability
Strict legal responsibility for developers of highly autonomous, general, and capable AI

Tiered safety standards
Comprehensive safety requirements that scale with system capability and risk

TOMORROW’S AI

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OpenEd

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Intended Use: Education/Culture

Technology Type: Interactive/Generative

Runaway Type: Loss of Shared Reality

Control Lever: Regulatory and Compliance Frameworks

Primary Setting: Global

A Global Gap in Education

By the late 2020s, a World Bank report triggers alarm: global literacy and aptitude scores are plunging, especially in low-income and conflict-affected regions. Micro-assessments embedded across social media and learning platforms reveal massive educational disparities. In response, governments and philanthropic coalitions scramble to find scalable, AI-driven solutions to rebuild high performance and trust in educational systems.

OpenEd

Led by a group of philanthropic funders and education ministries from Singapore, Australia, India, and the Nordic and Baltic states, OpenEd is born. Its goal is to create a free, open-source platform delivering rigorous, AI-personalized learning pathways. Early curricula focus heavily on boosting global aptitude scores, math proficiency, literacy rates, and standardized knowledge benchmarks, drawing heavily from top-performing education systems. OpenEd is framed as a tool to augment rather than replace teachers, providing support to under-resourced schools and remote learning programs.

Rapid Wins

Within three years, OpenEd shows remarkable gains. Literacy improves by 12% in under-resourced regions, and international aptitude scores rise by 8% among students using OpenEd weekly. In refugee learning programs, testing performance doubles compared to traditional instruction, and OpenEd-trained students are significantly more likely to meet secondary and postsecondary entry thresholds. As outcomes improve, better-resourced schools begin adopting the platform to support teachers overwhelmed by growing class sizes and curriculum demands.

Empowering Choice in Education

OpenEd is overseen by a coalition of educators, policymakers, and ethics experts known as the Global Knowledge Trust (GKT). While this is meant to protect OpenEd’s curricula from external influence, but as OpenEd’s own influence grows, concerns emerge over its influence on education. Educators and communities argue that OpenEd’s standardized pathways limit choice in the content, values and culture students learn. Some parents question whether AI is tracking or labeling students in ways that could limit future opportunity. Educators report growing tension between OpenEd’s recommendations and their own knowledge of students’ needs.

The Best of All Worlds

After extended deliberations, the GKT directs OpenEd to undergo a radical transformation. Curricular control is decentralized, empowering regional councils to define culturally grounded learning goals. Teachers regain central roles as interpreters, mentors, and guides, working alongside OpenEd’s AI to co-create student learning pathways. The platform now focuses on core competencies like collaboration, problem-solving, and ethical reasoning, with AI tools that flex to local content and traditions.

Education for Human Flourishing

By 2040, OpenEd becomes less a curriculum and more a scaffold for human flourishing. Students graduate not just with standardized knowledge, but with practical wisdom, cultural fluency, and resilience. Indigenous agriculture is taught alongside renewable energy science; conflict mediation sits beside calculus. Parents trust the system because teachers remain central and transparent. In an uncertain world, OpenEd becomes humanity’s living foundation: one that offers tools for not just learning, but thriving, in every corner of the globe.

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