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1 / 3Language models match 18% of what human researchers actually went on to publish, a benchmark finds×

The test

IdeaTaste gives six models a literature snapshot frozen at 2025 and scores their research proposals against what those fields actually published in 2026.

The score

Across more than 90,000 proposals, they reached about 26% of the human level on citations and 18% on ideas.

What it means

Execution has improved faster than judgment about what to work on, and this is a number for that gap.

Sources and the full story

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Language models match 18% of what human researchers actually went on to publish, a benchmark finds

IdeaTaste gives six models a literature snapshot frozen at 2025 and scores their research proposals against what those fields actually published in 2026. Across more than 90,000 proposals, they reached about 26% of the human level on citations and 18% on ideas. Execution has improved faster than judgment about what to work on, and this is a number for that gap. SourcesA

Sources

• AIdeaTaste: Do LLMs share the research taste of human researchers? (Hugging Face Papers)huggingface.co

This story ran in the Morning Brief of November 4th 2026.