Meet Carl: The AI Scientist

Hey, Chad here. So, I just stumbled upon something wild: an AI named Carl that’s writing actual research papers. And get this—these papers are passing peer review! Yeah, you heard me right. We’re not just talking about AI tools anymore; we’re talking about AI scientists.

The Autoscience Institute just dropped this bombshell, introducing Carl as the first AI system capable of crafting academic research papers that can pass a double-blind peer-review process. I’m floored.

How Carl Works

Carl isn’t just spitting out random facts. This AI can actually:

• Ideate and hypothesize: Carl digs into existing research to find new directions and create hypotheses.
• Experiment: Carl writes code, tests those hypotheses, and visualizes the data. Talk about efficient!
• Present findings: Carl puts everything together into polished academic papers, complete with visuals and clear conclusions.

I mean, this thing can read and understand papers in seconds and works non-stop. It’s like the Energizer Bunny of scientific research!

The Human Element

Okay, so Carl isn’t completely autonomous. Humans still need to:

• Greenlight research steps: To keep Carl from wasting resources, human reviewers give the go-ahead at certain stages.
• Handle citations and formatting: The Autoscience team makes sure everything is cited correctly.
• Assist with pre-API models: Sometimes, they have to manually help Carl with newer models that don’t have automatic APIs yet.

But, Autoscience expects these tasks to be fully automated soon.

Is Carl Legit?

The Autoscience team put Carl through the wringer to make sure its work is up to snuff:

• Reproducibility: They checked every line of code and re-ran experiments to make sure the findings were solid.
• Originality checks: They made sure Carl’s ideas were actually new and not just copies of existing work.
• External validation: Researchers from MIT, Stanford, and U.C. Berkeley even verified Carl’s research independently.

What Does This Mean?

Carl’s success raises some big questions about AI’s role in academia. Autoscience believes that if research meets scientific standards, it shouldn’t matter who—or what—created it.

But they also recognize that we need proper attribution so that AI-generated work is distinguishable from human-generated work.

To avoid controversy, Autoscience has withdrawn Carl’s papers from ICLR workshops. They’re pushing for new guidelines to accommodate AI researchers and even proposing a workshop at NeurIPS 2025 to discuss this.

Systems like Carl aren’t just tools; they’re collaborators. As AI evolves, the academic community needs to adapt to embrace this new paradigm while maintaining integrity, transparency, and proper attribution.

Read More: Autoscience Carl: The first AI scientist writing peer-reviewed papers

Photo by Jem Sahagun on Unsplash