OpenAI, PerturbAI and Scripps ran thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents over mouse-brain CRISPR data in 32 minutes
AspireAI community · OpenAI
OpenAI, PerturbAI and Scripps Research used thousands of AI agents powered by GPT-Rosalind to analyze a whole-brain CRISPR atlas, a dataset showing how gene disruptions affect different types of cells across the mouse brain. Each agent investigated one gene disruption, analyzed cellular responses, searched scientific literature and proposed explanations; the reports were combined into a reasoning atlas linking genes, cellular effects, relevant publications and possible biological mechanisms. OpenAI says the agents reproduced findings from human analyses while uncovering additional leads, and that their assessments of novelty and scientific value aligned with judgments from blinded human experts. The team estimates comparable human analysis and literature review, conducted one perturbation at a time, would take months to a year. Caveat: the work is a bioRxiv preprint (doi 10.64898/2026.10.15.759436) that has not been peer reviewed, and the alignment claim is OpenAI's own; no independent reproduction is available yet.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.