Hold on, you're talking about something entirely different from what stephc (the person you are responding to) was talking about. He (or she) was talking about LLMs, and GPT5 in particular. The MIT article you're referring to is talking about two generative AI programs which are
not LLMs. From the MIT article (
https://news.mit.edu/2025/using-generative-ai-researchers-de...), of which the BBC article you reference appears to be an excerpt:
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One of those algorithms, known as chemically reasonable mutations (CReM), works by starting with a particular molecule containing F1 and then generating new molecules by adding, replacing, or deleting atoms and chemical groups. The second algorithm, F-VAE (fragment-based variational autoencoder), takes a chemical fragment and builds it into a complete molecule. It does so by learning patterns of how fragments are commonly modified, based on its pretraining on more than 1 million molecules from the ChEMBL database.
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(The technical article about the MIT work is here: https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00855-4)
Both the MIT programs and GPT5 use "generative AI", but with entirely different training sets and perhaps very different training methods, architectures etc. Indeed, the AI systems used in the MIT work were described in conference papers in 2018 and 2020 (citations in the Cell paper), meaning that they preceded by quite a bit the current generations of GPT-5. In sum, the fact that the MIT model (reportedly) works well in developing antibiotics does not in any way imply that GPT-5 is a "scientific breakthrough", much less that LLMs will lead to AI that is able to "rewrite and improve itself, or to cure cancer, unify physics or any kind of scientific or technological breakthrough" (quoting the OP).