Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in the AI1Science Hackathon, hosted by HUN-REN. The event brought together researchers and technologists to explore what an “AI-first” approach to science might look like. My very good friend and long-time collaborator Levente Littvay and I developed a prototype we’ve been quietly working on: the Zeus Protocol.

Zeus aims to automate the core steps of experimental social science—from idea generation to synthetic pre-testing—by orchestrating a pipeline of LLMs that generate, peer-review, and simulate survey experiments. Think AlphaFold, but for survey experiments. (That’s all we’ll say for now.)

We also built a quick RAG-based chatbot for the Hungarian Parliament, joined by our colleague Klára Szalay.

We’re happy to share that our team placed 3rd in the competition. More soon :)