
Darpa Awards Ginkgo Bioworks and Transcriptic $9.5M to Bring AI into the Lab - escot
https://synbiobeta.com/darpa-awards-ginkgo-bioworks-and-transcriptic/
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dreamcompiler
Point of interest: The co-founder of Ginkgo is Tom Knight--the same Tom Knight
who designed the Symbolics lisp machine, the Knight keyboard, and
transactional memory (which later became software transactional memory). A few
years before he started Ginkgo he had a lab at MIT where he was building NAND
gates out of bacterial DNA. I expect Ginkgo will do just fine bringing AI to
the lab.

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tedivm
Ginkgo Bioworks is really cool. I was interviewing with them a few weeks ago
but ultimately took another job instead (one that didn't require me to move)
but I was pretty impressed with the conversations I had with their team. I
definitely expect this company to do amazing things.

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dpflan
Can anyone compare Ginko Bioworks to Zymergen?

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piercebot
This reminds me of the kind of science that Vernor Vinge imagined in his 2006
novel "Rainbow's End:"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End)

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j7ake
“Recently there has been an explosion in AI and machine learning, and that’s a
discipline where you don’t have to have a first principles model — you learn
the model,” said Maheshri. “The technology in both disciplines is at the point
where it’s time to combine them and see what happens.”

I disagree. If you don’t have a good model for basic sciences you should go
and look for one. You can’t get to the moon by fitting models from moving
objects.

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ericyang321
Transcriptic is doing great things. They are a passionate team doing amazing
work. Congratulations!

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jfarlow
Congratulations to both Ginkgo & Transcriptic! The newly-forming intimate
relationship between bio and advanced digital and automation processes is very
fun to watch.

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sjg007
This is awesome. Huge potential to be a quantum leap forward.

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stochastic_monk
Do you mean the smallest possible leap, IE, Planck distance, or a leap by
quantum tunneling into a state the barrier into which we have insufficient
energy to cross?

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sjg007
I'm using the metaphorical definition.

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stochastic_monk
I was just trying to point out that the term doesn't really have a well-
defined meaning close to what the expression is intending to say.

