Google DeepMind's ERA Reportedly Generated Its Own Scientific Methods — And Beat the CDC at COVID Forecasting

A new system described as an autonomous 'empirical research assistant' is said to have produced 14 forecasting models that outperformed the CDC and discovered 40 novel methods for cellular data analysis, using tree search over code and experiments.

While the agent-safety discourse dominated the week, a quieter claim may matter more for how research actually gets done. According to @GeneratedForAI, Google DeepMind has built a system called ERA — for something like Empirical Research Assistance — that "autonomously generates expert level scientific breakthroughs." The specifics are what make it worth attention rather than dismissal.

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