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Comment by ibestvina

1 day ago

> ... until we at the very least give LLMs a direct way to interact with lab equipment and train them using RL on it.

Which is exactly what is being done.

https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...

2 comments

ibestvina

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qlte  1 day ago

Not according to Anthropic:

  Our lab, located in the Bay Area, looks like a typical molecular biology lab. We do research that involves only the lower-levels of the biosafety risk level (BSL-1 and BSL-2) and we do not handle pathogens that can infect humans. All of the lab work is performed by human scientists. Although we’ve experimented with using AI to accelerate lab work with initiatives like the Model Hardware Standard, this approach is less conducive to the sort of ad hoc workflows that are involved in our molecular biology research.

  • dekhn  21 hours ago

    Automated labs are far more challenging to build and run than most people appreciate. If I wanted to make progress quickly in discovery science, I would find good lab techs before building automated labs.