AI agents can conduct genuine scientific research on unsolved problems—this benchmark shows agents building climate models that outperform published work and align with competing scientific theories, proving evaluation is possible without a known ground truth.
Researchers created SciExam for ENSO, a benchmark where AI agents build climate models of El Niño from real data without knowing the right answer. Agents work within a 6-hour budget, write their own diagnostics, and develop models tested against hidden criteria.