[hdivider]

This is far bigger than people think.

So much advanced equipment is just sitting there in labs, waiting for humans to finally go and make experiments. Which they eventually get round to, sort of, when they can secure funding and when the grad student isn't ill or making mistakes or framing the problem the wrong way.

AI-driven labs can iterate 'good enough' hypotheses way faster than human R&D systems. Automated labs are going to be a major source of discovery.

[vhiremath4]

> Eve independently screened some 1,600 chemicals and modelled how their structure related to their activity to predict which ones were worth testing. King and his group armed the robot with background knowledge and a machine-learning framework for developing hypotheses. Eve then used those elements to design experiments to test these hypotheses and, crucially, performed them itself.

> King plans to use the system — which occupies one-fifth of floor space than Eve does — to model how genes, proteins and small molecules interact in cells. Part of that will involve taking around 10,000 mass-spectrometry measurements each day.

The throughput here is astounding, especially when driven by researchers who really know how to chart a path. I feel every time a critical feedback loop is made both faster and cheaper, it makes everyone participating better. I wonder whether we will see many more "whiz kid" scientific researchers than we have today.

[magicalist]

> So much advanced equipment is just sitting there in labs, waiting for humans to finally go and make experiments. Which they eventually get round to, sort of, when they can secure funding and when the grad student isn't ill or making mistakes or framing the problem the wrong way.

That's not really what the article is about though. Short of staffing it with humanoid robots, existing labs and their equipment will continue to be unused.

[rsfern]

There are groups that are actively working on automating conventional labs like this. Most of the efforts I know about use non-humanoid mobile robots or even just a six-axis arm on a rail and some lab space reconfiguration

[xyzzy123]

I don't really see why most existing equipment would be usable in this way. When you automate a thing you often have to rethink the entire problem. But more generally, automation is for _repeatable_ things and a lot of research is... not that.

The expensive equipment is usually a small (but crucial!) part of research activity, which involves things like talking to a lot of people, getting permission to do weird or new things, going out into the environment and collecting things in very specific ways, storing and transporting them carefully, observing, etc. Building or modifying existing lab instruments, doing various things with animals that are not co-operative ... and CLEANING. Who does all the cleaning?

Definitely use cases when you have a specific protocol you want to scale, but I'm also not sure how safe I would feel around AI with a license to experiment and access to dangerous reagents, high temperatures, etc. Or, god help us, an oligonucleotide synthesizer. Which is definitely going to happen (if it has not already).

[fuzzfactor]

>Who does all the cleaning?

In some cases that would be the same person that does the most advanced innovative and/or creative work.

The idea behind the fully automated system is that fewer hired hands are needed for efforts that are routine enough. But not zero, you still need one person who can do everything at a minimum, if called upon for mission-critical operation.

In the case of the creative work and planning where it is out of the league for AI, these things need to always be done too, but they are not exactly "routine".

Once most of the tedious routine tasks are well-automated though, then the human brain behind the lab can finally relax a bit, with eurekas flowing at the same rate without needing a full 40 or 50 addititonal hours at the bench any more, while even more results are generated than they could do single-handedly too.

Which gives them the time to do the cleaning also, otherwise they would need two humans to serve their only automated system.

[dyauspitr]

Probably like a ATLAS or a unitree robot.They are beginning to get very good.

[mmooss]

> AI-driven labs can iterate 'good enough' hypotheses way faster than human R&D systems.

Is there evidence of that?