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

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

From Training Data by Sequoia Capital

March 24, 2026 · 58 min

About this episode

Jason Kelly discusses how AI and autonomous labs are transforming scientific research and the implications for biopharma and human health.

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 follow, with profound implications for biopharma, national competitiveness, and human health. Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

People in this episode

Hosts: Sonya Huang, Pat Grady

Guest: Jason Kelly

Topics covered

  • autonomous labs
  • scientific research
  • AI in biochemistry
  • biopharma
  • cost of discovery

Keywords

  • autonomous labs
  • scientific research
  • AI
  • biochemistry
  • Ginkgo Bioworks
  • OpenAI
  • cost of discovery

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Ginkgo Bioworks, OpenAI

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