Broken Peer Review, AI, and Worms — with Oded Rechavi
Oded Rechavi is a biologist at Tel Aviv University and the co-founder of QED, a company building AI to review scientific work. He's also spent years studying worms.
We start with what's wrong with peer review and grant funding: why it takes years to publish, why reviewers are often your own competitors, and why the whole thing is locked to an economic model that rewards publishing more papers, not better ones. Oded explains why he doesn't call QED "peer review" at all, and what it would take to actually validate science instead of just stamping it.
Then we get into the biology. C. elegans has exactly 959 cells, every one of them named, and a fully mapped brain. Oded's lab studies how a worm's experiences get passed to its offspring through RNA rather than DNA — meaning what happens to a worm in its lifetime can change its descendants. We also talk about using ancient DNA to reassemble the Dead Sea Scrolls, what AI can and can't do for biology, and why he wants to build an "Ironman suit" for researchers rather than replace them.
00:00 Intro
01:35 Why scientific publishing is broken
04:02 Years to publish, and what it costs science
07:20 Bad reviewers, conflicts of interest, and the money
10:47 Why preprints don't fix it
15:37 How AI conferences handle review
22:07 Conferences vs. journals — does slow review help?
25:22 Building QED: review, not peer review
30:02 Tracking a paper from idea to submission
33:11 What writing a grant actually involves
35:00 The ERC reviewer crisis
37:06 Tailoring feedback to your field
41:48 Switching to biology
44:30 Every cell has a name: inside C. elegans
46:28 Inheritance without DNA
48:16 What the worm "thinks" changes its offspring
51:58 Reassembling the Dead Sea Scrolls with ancient DNA
56:07 Psychedelics and worms
58:36 Can AI run the research itself?
1:04:49 Automation vs. validation
1:07:12 The origin of life
1:08:49 Why people reject AI-written work
1:16:18 Will humans still have a role?
1:17:39 Wrap-up
Music:
- "Kid Kodi" - Blue Dot Sessions - via Free Music Archive - CC BY-NC 4.0.
About: The Information Bottleneck is hosted by Ravid Shwartz-Ziv and Allen Roush, featuring in-depth conversations with leading AI researchers about the ideas shaping the future of machine learning.