March 2026
March 2026
AI Scientist-v2 produces first peer-reviewed workshop paper written entirely by AI
Sakana AI released AI Scientist-v2, a fully autonomous research system that formulates hypotheses, writes code, runs experiments, and produces complete scientific manuscripts. The system generated a workshop paper that was accepted through standard peer review — the first time this has been achieved without human authorship.
February 2026
Google AI Co-Scientist generates and validates novel biomedical hypotheses
Google DeepMind unveiled AI Co-Scientist, a multi-agent system designed as a virtual scientific collaborator. The system autonomously generates novel research hypotheses and proposals across biomedical domains, then validates them using internal reasoning and literature synthesis before presenting them to human researchers.
December 2025
December 17, 2025
NOAA deploys AI weather models operationally for the first time
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deployed three AI-driven global weather models into operational service: AIGFS, AIGEFS, and a hybrid system combining AI with traditional physics-based ensembles. Built on DeepMind's GraphCast foundation and fine-tuned on NOAA data, the models use up to 99.7% fewer computing resources while extending forecast skill by 18–24 hours beyond traditional systems.
November 5, 2025
AlphaEvolve discovers new mathematical structures and improves on Strassen's algorithm
DeepMind released AlphaEvolve, a Gemini-powered evolutionary coding agent that discovered new algorithms for matrix multiplication — improving upon Strassen's 1969 result — and established a new lower bound for the kissing number problem in 11 dimensions. Tested across 67 open problems in mathematics, it rediscovered best-known solutions in most cases and improved several.
August 14, 2025
Generative AI designs novel compounds that kill drug-resistant bacteria
MIT researchers used generative AI to design entirely new chemical compounds effective against drug-resistant bacteria. Unlike previous AI-assisted antibiotic discovery that screened existing libraries, this approach generated novel molecular structures from scratch, targeting specific bacterial vulnerabilities identified by the model.
August 2025
First AI-designed drug shows positive Phase IIa results in humans
Rentosertib (ISM001-055), a drug designed entirely by AI for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, reported positive Phase IIa clinical trial results showing improvement in lung function. The compound was discovered in approximately 18 months at a cost under $2.6 million — a fraction of typical drug development timelines and budgets.
October 2024
October 9, 2024
Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry awarded to AI pioneers
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for foundational work on artificial neural networks. The Chemistry prize went to David Baker for computational protein design, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of DeepMind for AlphaFold — an AI system that solved the 50-year protein structure prediction challenge. It was the first time AI methods earned Nobel recognition in two disciplines simultaneously.
August 12, 2024
First fully autonomous AI research system attempts end-to-end science
Sakana AI launched The AI Scientist, the first comprehensive system designed to automate the entire research lifecycle — from idea generation and coding to running experiments and writing complete scientific manuscripts. The system produced research papers for approximately $15 each, though independent evaluation revealed coding errors in 42% of experiments and limited novelty detection.
May 8, 2024
AlphaFold 3 predicts protein-DNA, protein-RNA, and drug interactions
DeepMind released AlphaFold 3, expanding beyond protein structure prediction to accurately model interactions between proteins and DNA, RNA, and small-molecule drugs. The system achieved a 50% accuracy improvement over AlphaFold 2, enabling prediction of the molecular interactions that underpin most biological processes.
January 2024
GenCast AI outperforms world's best weather ensemble on 97% of targets
DeepMind's GenCast, a diffusion-based probabilistic weather model, was shown to outperform the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) full 51-member ensemble system on 97.2% of 1,320 evaluation targets across 1–15 day forecast windows. The model generates forecasts in minutes rather than hours.
December 2023
December 20, 2023
AI identifies a new structural class of antibiotic candidates
MIT researchers used deep learning to identify an entirely new structural class of antibiotic compounds effective against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). The AI model not only found the candidates but also explained its reasoning, revealing the chemical substructures responsible for antimicrobial activity — a key advance in interpretable AI for drug discovery.
November 29, 2023
GNoME discovers 2.2 million new crystal structures
DeepMind released GNoME (Graph Networks for Materials Exploration), a deep learning tool that predicted the stability of 2.2 million new crystal structures — equivalent to roughly 800 years of traditional materials science knowledge. Of these, 380,000 were identified as highly stable and promising for experimental synthesis. External labs independently created 736 of these new structures.
November 14, 2023
GraphCast outperforms traditional weather forecasting on 90% of variables
DeepMind's GraphCast, a graph neural network weather model, outperformed the ECMWF's operational forecasting system on 90% of evaluated meteorological variables. The model produces global 0.25-degree resolution forecasts in under one minute — a process that takes traditional physics-based models significantly longer.
May 25, 2023
AI discovers abaucin — a new antibiotic targeting a critical superbug
MIT researchers used AI to discover abaucin, a novel antibiotic compound effective against Acinetobacter baumannii — classified by the WHO as a critical-priority superbug. The AI screened thousands of compounds and identified one that kills the pathogen by disrupting its lipoprotein trafficking, a mechanism the model identified without human guidance. The compound was validated in mouse models.
July 2022
July 22, 2022
AlphaFold predicts the structure of virtually every known protein
DeepMind released predicted structures for nearly all 200 million proteins known to science — the entire protein universe catalogued in UniProt. The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database expanded from 1 million to over 200 million entries in a single release, freely accessible to researchers worldwide.
July 2021
July 15, 2021
AlphaFold 2 released open-source — solving the protein folding problem
DeepMind open-sourced AlphaFold 2 and its full training code, making its protein structure prediction capabilities freely available to the global research community. The system predicts 3D protein structures to near-experimental accuracy, a problem that had resisted solution for 50 years. The work later contributed to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
February 2020
February 20, 2020
AI discovers halicin — a new antibiotic effective against resistant bacteria
MIT researchers trained a machine learning model to identify chemical structures that could inhibit bacterial growth, then screened over 100 million compounds. The model discovered halicin, a molecule with a novel mechanism of action effective against drug-resistant strains of E. coli, C. difficile, A. baumannii, and M. tuberculosis. The compound was named after HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey."