OpenAI's @kevinweil says 24/7 robotic labs could automate scientific discovery using "reinforcement learning with a loop through the real world": "There’s a lot of science that can be totally automated. There’s no reason at this point that you need to have grad students pipetting one thing into another thing." "The idea is to have robotic labs that are online 24/7 and can scale in parallel. You have models reasoning for two days to find the most efficient experiments to run, once they get to a good point, they pass that to a robotic lab which can experiment in parallel at high volume." "The results pass back into a model which reasons about the results and then goes out and runs a different set of experiments. You’re doing reinforcement learning with a loop through the real world."