Robot Lab

Google’s Deep Mind Lab is going to build a materials science lab in the UK, manned by robots and humans:

To help turbocharge scientific discovery, we will establish Google DeepMind’s first automated laboratory in the UK in 2026, specifically focused on materials science research. A multidisciplinary team of researchers will oversee research in the lab, which will be built from the ground up to be fully integrated with Gemini. By directing world-class robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, the team intends to significantly shorten the timeline for identifying transformative new materials.

This is a very big deal. Gemini won’t just read papers. It will design the experiments, run the experiments, learn from the successes and failures and then recursively improve. It’s an attempt to learn the game of material science in the same way AlphaGo learned the game of Go.