A Startup Has Created a Lab Where AI Runs Its Own Experiments

We really do live on the verge of a new era of scientific progress. Case in point, a company called Lila Sciences was started two years ago with about $200 million in seed funding, but until very recently all of its activities have been kept under the radar. So what is Lila Sciences doing? They are training an AI in the scientific method and then prompting it to create new things using a special automated laboratory that the AI itself can operate.

Lila’s mission is to achieve “scientific superintelligence” that is able to help scientists generate ideas and hypotheses and then design and conduct experiments to test those hypotheses, CEO Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Ph.D., said in the release.

“To achieve this, we must solve the hard problems to allow AI to autonomously and in a scalable manner run each step—from AI models generating an idea to reducing it to practice with robotics and automation,” von Maltzahn said.

Since Lila’s 2023 founding, Flagship claims the company’s platform has already achieved groundbreaking results in various scientific areas. This includes large language models with state-of-the-art scientific reasoning abilities, the generation of genetic medicine constructs that perform better than commercially available therapeutics, and the discovery and validation of hundreds of new antibodies, peptides and binders for a broad range of therapeutic targets, according to the release.

The company was originally two separate startups, one looking to create biological products and one looking to create new materials. Once they realized they were both competing to hire some of the same people, they combined forces.

Lila resulted from the merger of two early A.I. company projects at Flagship, one focused on new materials and the other on biology. The two groups were trying to solve similar problems and recruit the same people, so they combined forces, said Molly Gibson, a computational biologist and a Lila co-founder.

The Lila team has completed five projects to demonstrate the abilities of its A.I., a powerful version of one of a growing number of sophisticated assistants known as agents. In each case, scientists — who typically had no specialty in the subject matter — typed in a request for what they wanted the A.I. program to accomplish. After refining the request, the scientists, working with A.I. as a partner, ran experiments and tested the results — again and again, steadily homing in on the desired target.

One of those projects found a new catalyst for green hydrogen production, which involves using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The A.I. was instructed that the catalyst had to be abundant or easy to produce, unlike iridium, the current commercial standard. With A.I.’s help, the two scientists found a novel catalyst in four months — a process that more typically might take years.

That success helped persuade John Gregoire, a prominent researcher in new materials for clean energy, to leave the California Institute of Technology last year to join Lila as head of physical sciences research.

None of these projects are about to become products in the next year but the pace of discovery is what has people excited. The real world laboratory that the AI agent controls feeds its data back to the AI meaning outcomes can be analyzed quickly and new approaches tried immediately. And while the humans supervising the process need breaks to sleep and eat, the AI and the lab could in theory run 24/7. It’s very much a science fiction premise brought into the real world.

Finally, in working on this post I looked at several stories about this company including one that contained this note at the bottom: “This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor.” So a scientific superintelligence is running an automated lab and the article about the development was written by AI. If that’s not a sign of things to come, I’m not sure what is.