This seems to be an institutional, massively scaled version of https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch.

In March Karpathy described this direction:

   The next step for autoresearch is that it has to be asynchronously massively collaborative for agents (think: SETI@home style).

Seems like Karpathy was largely focused on ML / SWE research rather than the other domains this group is after. Still, hard to imagine they were not influenced by autoresearch.

Andrej, if you're around, please share your thoughts on Discovery Loop.

That is also what I understand from that page. Autoresearch is the closest thing we (mainstream audience) know of but I am sure there is already an active research literature around it.