You have a good point about Transcriptic and “cloud labs”, but one issue is, that model seems incompatible with the current structure of both university labs and drug companies. A university lab today is a barony ruled by a professor, and it does its own research. Labs generally don’t even share reagents, they’ll each buy little bottles instead of sharing a bigger bottle that could be half the total cost.
My impression is, Ginkgo and Automata don’t understand manufacturing, and I don’t think a “cloud lab” would buy their hardware when it’s cheaper to buy generic general-purpose robotic arms. Also, Y Combinator companies in general...these days when I see “funded by Y Combinator” it gives me a similar impression to reading “MIT scientists have discovered”.
About Briefly Bio and Tetsuwan, I personally think they should be sticking to text-based high-level descriptions. Yes, Unreal’s Blueprints and ComfyUI are considered successful, but specifications having version control would be especially helpful for lab experiments. And of course LLMs are better at outputting text than custom GUI programming systems; if you have a good enough high-level description you could probably just translate natural language to it automatically.
You have a good point about Transcriptic and “cloud labs”, but one issue is, that model seems incompatible with the current structure of both university labs and drug companies. A university lab today is a barony ruled by a professor, and it does its own research. Labs generally don’t even share reagents, they’ll each buy little bottles instead of sharing a bigger bottle that could be half the total cost.
My impression is, Ginkgo and Automata don’t understand manufacturing, and I don’t think a “cloud lab” would buy their hardware when it’s cheaper to buy generic general-purpose robotic arms. Also, Y Combinator companies in general...these days when I see “funded by Y Combinator” it gives me a similar impression to reading “MIT scientists have discovered”.
About Briefly Bio and Tetsuwan, I personally think they should be sticking to text-based high-level descriptions. Yes, Unreal’s Blueprints and ComfyUI are considered successful, but specifications having version control would be especially helpful for lab experiments. And of course LLMs are better at outputting text than custom GUI programming systems; if you have a good enough high-level description you could probably just translate natural language to it automatically.