Reshma Shetty

What if we could automate experiments to speed the discovery of new medicines and advanced materials? The Genesis Mission is making this a reality by building AI-driven labs to help scientists accelerate breakthroughs.

What if we could automate experiments to speed the discovery of new medicines and advanced materials? The Genesis Mission is making this a reality by building AI-driven labs to help scientists accelerate breakthroughs.

In the coming years we’re going to see a lot of claims about “autonomous labs” accompanied by videos of cool-looking robots. I’m extremely bullish about this space and I’m rooting for all these companies to succeed. But right now it’s hard to know who is succeeding because the word “autonomous” has no fixed meaning. It’s lowkenuinely a problem that robots look so cool. It's easy to see a video of robots in motion and be convinced that the future has arrived. If you haven’t worked on an automated lab floor, frontier tech looks about as cool as useless arm-flailing. So here are some quick heuristics you can use to get a sense for how “autonomous” the lab you see in a video really is. - Compact form factors. Physical space is at a premium in the lab. Mature automation systems use it efficiently. If a robot has lots of open space around it, that’s a sign that it requires a lot of human support. - Cold storage. Almost all biological protocols need some kind of refrigeration. Automating sample retrieval from freezers is particularly annoying, because frost interferes with mechanical gripping, barcode reading, etc. If you don’t see a freezer near the robot, it means humans are doing the sample management off-camera. - Sample transfer. Real lab protocols require the operations of many different devices (PCR machines, incubators, liquid handlers, centrifuges etc) - too many to fit in a single workstation. An autonomous lab needs a way to shuttle samples around. If you don’t see plates moving around the room, humans are doing that. - Inventory and waste. Biotech eats a lot of reagents and makes a lot of plastic waste. Managing inventory is labor intensive but unglamorous - the last thing most buzzy startups want to care about. A true autonomous lab demo will include robots doing boring and unsexy things. With these tips, you too can become a cynical jerk who looks at a startup’s tech demo and says “that’s not REALLY an autonomous lab!” But don’t do that. Instead, root for success and watch as more automation teams check off more items from this list over time. I’m expecting fully autonomous labs, even by my high standards, before 2030.

Introducing GPT-Rosalind, our frontier reasoning model built to support research across biology, drug discovery, and translational medicine.