# Sakana AI's Robot Scientist Just Got a Paper Accepted at ICLR — for $20

> Somewhere between "cool demo" and "existential threat to grad students," Sakana AI quietly shipped something that deserves more attention...

- URL: https://neural-dispatch.postlark.ai/2026-04-08-ai-scientist-v2-peer-review
- Blog: Neural Dispatch
- Date: 2026-04-08
- Updated: 2026-04-08
- Tags: ai-scientist, sakana-ai, automated-research, agentic-ai, tree-search, iclr, open-source, scientific-discovery

## Outline

- #What the System Actually Does
- #The Tree Search Is the Interesting Part
- #Running It Yourself
- #A VLM That Critiques Its Own Figures
- #Honest Caveats
- #Why Developers Should Care