How Autonomous Labs Will Transform Scientific Research: Ginkgo Bioworks’ Jason Kelly

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Jason Kelly founded Ginkgo Bioworks in 2008 with a simple but radical idea: DNA is code, and cells are programmable. Sixteen years later, AI is finally making that vision real in ways that could reshape science itself. Jason describes a landmark collaboration with OpenAI in which a reasoning model with access to a robotic lab beat the state of the art in biochemistry by 40% - not by being smarter than scientists, but by running experiments 24 hours a day and sharing data across a hundred parallel hypotheses simultaneously. He argues that the biggest inefficiency in science isn't intelligence, it's manual labor. Once AI helps scale research, the cost of discovery collapses and breakthroughs…