MIT Technology Review January 20, 2026
A competition calling for proposals shows just how fast the field is moving.
A number of startups and universities that are building AI scientists to design and run experiments in the lab, including robot biologists and chemists, have just won extra funding from the UK government agency that funds moonshot R&D. The competition, set up by ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), gives a clear sense of how fast this technology is moving, with the agency receiving 245 proposals from research teams that are already building tools that can automate increasing amounts of lab work.
ARIA defines an AI scientist as a system that can run an entire scientific workflow, coming up with hypotheses, designing and running experiments to test...
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