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.