AI agents can't yet do open-ended AI research

AI智能体尚无法开展开放式AI研究

Princeton researchers gave frontier AI agents thousands of dollars and six days to replicate two unpublished papers. The original authors rejected both agent papers outright. The agents lacked research judgment, abandoned promising directions after seeing low-quality data, spent less than half their budget, and responded to negative feedback by adding caveats instead of changing course. Open-ended AI research is still out of reach.

Why it matters: Princeton ran a controlled experiment: two unpublished research topics, top agents, thousands of dollars, six days. Both papers were rejected by the original authors. 100+ hours of logs revealed the real gap isn't compute — it's research judgment. Agents proposed promising dir...