Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
The method is the contribution Most claims about agents automating research collapse under one of two problems. Either the evaluation uses narrow, verifiable tasks — which by construction excludes the open-ended part that makes research hard — or it submits AI-generated papers to blind peer review, a process the authors describe bluntly as overstretched, stochastic and suffering from poor review quality. The paper, Can AI agents conduct open-ended AI research? Early evidence from two case studies (arXiv 2607.27191), proposes a third option it calls a shadow evaluation. The design is elegant: Take a high-quality paper that has been written but not published. Give an agent the paper's central, open-ended research question. Let it work with real time and real compute. Have the paper's…
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