Research map / Large language models / AI and society
Towards Scientific Discovery with Generative AI: Progress, Opportunities, and Challenges
Read the paperCheck your idea against 108,967 papers
AI-extracted summary. Written by AI from the paper's full text. Numbers and claims can be wrong or missing context, so check the paper before you cite or build on it.
A position/survey paper reviewing recent generative AI and LLM advances for scientific tasks and outlining challenges (benchmarks, science agents, multimodal representations, theory-data unification) toward autonomous scientific discovery.
Problem
Current AI systems automate isolated aspects of scientific reasoning, experimentation, and simulation but lack integrated systems capable of autonomous long-term scientific research and discovery.
Approach
Surveys recent AI-for-science progress across literature analysis, theorem proving, experimental design, and data-driven discovery, then proposes a research agenda of four challenge areas for unified AI discovery systems.
Key results
- No new experiments are reported; the paper reviews prior results such as GNoME's order-of-magnitude increase in known stable crystals and AI Feynman's rediscovery of physics equations.
- Proposes four research directions: science-focused agents, improved benchmarks and metrics (novelty, generalizability, alignment with scientific principles), multimodal scientific representations, and theory-data unification.
Limitations
- No original experiments; claims rely on cited prior work.
- Many cited examples are described only briefly without quantitative comparison.
Experimental setup
Builds on: GPT-f Draft-Sketch-Prove SNIP LLM-SR AI Feynman
Closest papers by meaning
- AI-Researcher: Autonomous Scientific Innovation (NeurIPS 2025 · similarity 0.92)
- SciResearchBench: Benchmarking AI Agents on Complex Scientific Literature Discovery (NeurIPS 2026 · similarity 0.88)
- Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery: From Paradigm Enhancement to Paradigm Transition (NeurIPS 2025 · similarity 0.87)
- DiscoveryWorld: A Virtual Environment for Developing and Evaluating Automated Scientific Discovery Agents (NeurIPS 2024 · similarity 0.87)
- Agentic AI Scientists Are Not Built For Autonomous Scientific Discovery (NeurIPS 2026 · similarity 0.87)
- SciCode: A Research Coding Benchmark Curated by Scientists (NeurIPS 2024 · similarity 0.86)
Writing a paper in this area? scime draft is a free LaTeX editor with AI included, real-time co-authors and a check of your references and venue rules before you submit. It also imports OpenAI Prism projects.