{"ID":2888234,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23276","arxiv_id":"2507.23276","title":"How Far Are AI Scientists from Changing the World?","abstract":"The emergence of large language models (LLMs) is propelling automated scientific discovery to the next level, with LLM-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) Scientist systems now taking the lead in scientific research. Several influential works have already appeared in the field of AI Scientist systems, with AI-generated research papers having been accepted at the ICLR 2025 workshop, suggesting that a human-level AI Scientist capable of uncovering phenomena previously unknown to humans, may soon become a reality. In this survey, we focus on the central question: How far are AI scientists from changing the world and reshaping the scientific research paradigm? To answer this question, we provide a prospect-driven review that comprehensively analyzes the current achievements of AI Scientist systems, identifying key bottlenecks and the critical components required for the emergence of a scientific agent capable of producing ground-breaking discoveries that solve grand challenges. We hope this survey will contribute to a clearer understanding of limitations of current AI Scientist systems, showing where we are, what is missing, and what the ultimate goals for scientific AI should be.","short_abstract":"The emergence of large language models (LLMs) is propelling automated scientific discovery to the next level, with LLM-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) Scientist systems now taking the lead in scientific research. Several influential works have already appeared in the field of AI Scientist systems, with AI-generated...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23276","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23276v2","authors":"[\"Qiujie Xie\",\"Yixuan Weng\",\"Minjun Zhu\",\"Fuchen Shen\",\"Shulin Huang\",\"Zhen Lin\",\"Jiahui Zhou\",\"Zilan Mao\",\"Zijie Yang\",\"Linyi Yang\",\"Jian Wu\",\"Yue Zhang\"]","published":"2025-07-31T06:32:06Z","proceeding":"cs.AI","tasks":"[\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}