🔬 An Oscar, Two Asteroids, and the Algorithm in Your sklearn: John Platt on AI for Science

Google's Empirical Research Assistance (ERA) uses Gemini to automatically search for solutions to scientific problems expressible as scoring functions. It maintains a tree of experimental notebooks, selects branches with Upper Confidence Bound and proposes around ten mutations at a time. Between Gemini 2.0 and 2.5, it went from unusable to highly effective.