IntroductionAI developers aim to create an automated AI researcher. How close are they? Existing evidence shows that AI can perform software engineering tasks relevant to AI research, dataset creation,1 and other tasks, including open-ended optimization of defined metrics (autoresearch). But it remains unclear what full automation of AI R&D entails, given the wide range of activities involved. One obvious gap is the ability to conduct end-to-end research projects.2 Similar to recent work such as...