Curious to see how this

Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

thing unfolds https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/

I suspect it shows how low the bar for "research" has been, rather than how good AI has become for doing science.

"Fully automated" is not credible. A big part of doing science is identifying relevant problems to solve, and later verifying that the solution, after many hypotheses and approximations, remains relevant. But relevance judgements are not automatable. Incidentally, they are also the main reason why diversity in science matters. Different people have different ideas about relevance.