This was an unnecessary experiment that was only done a live mouse (vs a simulation) for the attention grabbing effect.

Obviously an AI agent can perform a simple surgical procedure. The question is how to get it to perform reliably.

The reason AI agents work as well as they do with code is because they get feedback and retry in a loop. Surgery is inherently inflicting “harm” on a patient, so there’s no bright line guardrail to apply to the agent loop.

Agents performing surgery won’t be possible until models get much much more reliable or we develop a simulation that matches reality close enough that we can use that in realtime for their feedback loop. I think we’re likely very far off from either solution.