discovery

Definition

Finding something not previously known, as distinct from retrieving or summarizing what already is. Papers on automating scientific discovery ask whether a system can go from hypothesis generation through experiment design to validation, rather than merely producing plausible-sounding proposals. The hard part is verification: establishing that a generated claim is both novel and true generally requires work outside the model.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: Code as Worlds — An Agent That Writes the World Down as Runnable CodeCode as Worlds: Agentic Discovery of Executable World Representations for Physical Reasoning
• Paper Deep Dive — Large Discovery Models: giving an LLM a value signal for what to try nextLarge Discovery Models: Empirically-grounded Model-Based Open-Ended Search