AiScientist

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AiScientist is AweAI’s artifact-mediated research lab for long-horizon ML engineering: a hierarchical agent team that coordinates through File-as-Bus, treating the workspace’s files rather than chat messages as the system of record, with a paper track that reproduces published work and an MLE track that pushes a metric across 24-hour runs.

It is the only member here whose unit of work is the reproduction, and its coordination claim (thin control over thick state) attacks the failure the other multi-agent columns leave implicit, context loss across long runs, while its name guarantees it will be mistaken for Sakana’s AI Scientist in every search.

What it is
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A Python system (github.com/AweAI-Team/AiScientist, MIT, initial public release 2026-04-13) described in the April 2026 paper “Toward Autonomous Long-Horizon Engineering for ML Research” (arXiv 2604.13018) by Guoxin Chen, Jie Chen, Lei Chen, and coauthors including Renmin University’s Wayne Xin Zhao and Ji-Rong Wen. The paper workflow takes a paper’s markdown or bundle plus a GPU and time budget and drives the full reproduction loop: reading, planning, implementing, experimenting, debugging, and final self-check. The mle workflow takes an ML task and runs repeated implementation-and-experiment cycles that improve the target metric, with the README’s example trajectory showing 78 experiment cycles in a 24-hour autonomous run. Benchmark integrations sit in the repository under MLE-bench and frontier-evals (PaperBench).

Status
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Dormant after a short public life: 146 stars, 12 forks, created 2026-03-30, last pushed 2026-07-21, as of 2026-10-11. A search for the name surfaces only Sakana’s AI Scientist coverage; this project has no visible Hacker News footprint as of 2026-10-11.

Strengths
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File-as-Bus is a testable coordination thesis: agents preserve decision-relevant state in workspace files across roles and invocations instead of compressing progress into conversation.
The paper track targets reproduction, the deliverable the rest of the idea-to-paper sub-family skips in favor of new papers.
The paper claims improvement over the strongest matched baselines on PaperBench, with the benchmark integration public in the repository.
MIT license and a documented disk layout (what lands on the workspace) keep runs inspectable.

Cautions
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Dormant since July 2026 after roughly four months of public development, with 146 stars and no independent coverage this run’s searches could find.
The benchmark claims are the project’s own runs, self-scored on PaperBench and MLE-Bench configurations it integrated itself.
The name collides with Sakana’s far better-known AI Scientist, which buries discoverability for any query an autocomplete renders as “AI scientist”.
The 78-cycle, 24-hour headline is a single trajectory the README presents without an ablation.

Pricing
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Free and open source under MIT; there is no paid tier, so pricing does not apply. Costs are your own GPUs (the workflows take explicit GPU and time budgets) and LLM API calls.

Compared to
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Sakana AI Scientist: the name it will be confused with; Sakana’s system writes new papers while AiScientist reproduces existing ones, and only AiScientist is MIT-licensed.
AIDE ML: the metric-judged tree search; AiScientist’s MLE track is the long-horizon, hierarchically orchestrated variant of the same objective.
CORAL: the other coordination-first member; CORAL isolates the judge from the agents while AiScientist makes the filesystem the coordination medium.

Bottom line
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Recommended reading for the File-as-Bus coordination argument and as the sub-family’s reproduction-track data point, both preserved in the arXiv paper despite the repository’s dormancy. Not for production use: the repository has been dormant since July 2026 and the benchmark claims have no independent check.

Changes
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2026-10-11 - Created.

References
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https://github.com/AweAI-Team/AiScientist - repository, MIT license, 146 stars, last push 2026-07-21 (as of 2026-10-11)
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AweAI-Team/AiScientist/main/README.md - File-as-Bus, the paper and MLE tracks, the 24-hour 78-cycle trajectory, and the release dates (fetched 200, 2026-10-11)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13018 - the paper: authors, thin control over thick state, and the PaperBench improvement claim (fetched 200 via the arXiv API, 2026-10-11)
https://api.github.com/repos/AweAI-Team/AiScientist/contents/benchmark - the MLE-bench and frontier-evals (PaperBench) integration directories (fetched 200, 2026-10-11)
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=AiScientist - the search surfacing only Sakana collision results, no footprint for this project (fetched 200, 2026-10-11)

paper-reproduction on tomrochette.com

AiScientist

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paper-reproduction on tomrochette.com

AiScientist

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