Wolfe: Physical reactions will bottleneck AI-driven scientific breakthroughs
Josh Wolfe · Josh Wolfe: Human Advantage in the World of AI · Mar 4, 2025 · at 33:03
Josh Wolfe, co-founder of Lux Capital, discusses AI's impact on scientific discovery and why physical lab constraints cannot be completely bypassed by simulation.
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“So, I definitely think that there will be this recursive improvement, but you're still going back to being rate limited by time and biological or chemical reactions. You still need to instantiate this into a physical experiment. And so you can model and simulate all you want, but then you actually have to, like, do the thing and make the compound, and so those still take steps, and, you know, organic chemistry, and there's, like, 20 reaction steps, and people optimize to, like, reduce them down to six, and you still need the physical reagents and the right temperature and the experimental design, so I still think that that's gonna be the bottleneck, but for sure, like, the ideation and experimental design is gonna, that's just gonna absolutely explode.”
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