The speaker distinguishes auto-research with a clearly specified objective from open-ended science for paradigm shifts, where neither humans nor AI can specify the objective.

“yeah i i think there's different kinds of research there's like research where it's like the auto research style where the objective is already specified very cleanly”

“you're optimizing that objective and i think everyone is picturing like if we continue along this path of like you know making pre-training loss go down making”

“our environment”

“together what and those go up that's going to lead to like improvement but like yeah maybe what Ryan is talking about is like this much more open-ended type of science which is required for like paradigm shifts where we can't specify the objective and the AIs are definitely not able to specify that objective either like we have to be really really careful about how we specify objectives for any of these things”