Autonomous AI agents are no longer just chatbot sidekicks; they are becoming self-improving research engines. The bold claim: give an agent access to real-world tasks and it can learn fast enough to outrun the human-engineered pipeline, eventually building its own successor.

Evidence For

• Alibaba’s Damo Academy unveiled ElementsClaw, calling it the first AI agent dedicated to superconducting materials. Powered by a 1-billion-parameter foundation model trained on 125 million...