> If the LLM comes up with the big ideas and tells a human technical assistant to execute (put the vial here, run the 3D printer with this file, put the object there, drive in a screw), would that help?
No, because the bottleneck isn't the thinking but running experiments.
I worked in solar research, assembling a cell to test implied 40 different steps and from beginning to testing it was around 4 to 5 days.
This means that in one year working full time I will realistically run 40ish different experiments. Many of those will need to be done multiple times, and when you have 40 different steps that can go wrong and kill your efficiency this further compounds.
Thus realistically are running 5 to 10 different experiments (or better, a handful plus their variations).
At no point in this process you're like "yeah, if only LLMs could provide ideas", it's just not true, you get millions of ideas, time and bodies are the limit.
In biochemistry there are multiple vendors that sell semi-to-fully automated setups that do large numbers of experiments in parallel.
I have no idea what solar research experimentation looks like in detail, is it theoretically possible to build similar setups for that use case? Where exactly is the bottleneck?
This may be a problem of scale. biochem is a much wider field, and I guess, depending on what devices exactly you mean, a lot of it is usable in other bio fields (like https://www.faulhaber.com/en/markets/laboratory-automation/l... - the pictures showing a common general bio-lab scenario, there can be thousands of such assays to test)?
So it depends on if the same machinery can be used for more general material science research and testing work.
Not to worry. With the millions unemployed by AGI, you can get hundreds of thousands of unskilled "hands" for your IA. Even with reasonable failure rates you will get a few hundred experimenters past the 40 steps.
Not sure if I should finish with /s or /fear or /uncertainty
No, because the bottleneck isn't the thinking but running experiments.
I worked in solar research, assembling a cell to test implied 40 different steps and from beginning to testing it was around 4 to 5 days.
This means that in one year working full time I will realistically run 40ish different experiments. Many of those will need to be done multiple times, and when you have 40 different steps that can go wrong and kill your efficiency this further compounds.
Thus realistically are running 5 to 10 different experiments (or better, a handful plus their variations).
At no point in this process you're like "yeah, if only LLMs could provide ideas", it's just not true, you get millions of ideas, time and bodies are the limit.