Nabil Laoudji

Host, Discovery Engines podcast. Explorer of humanity, technology, and the universe 🌌

[Nabil Laoudji @nabilwrites]

I went to America's largest lab automation conference (@SLAS_Org) to see the bleeding edge of lab automation first-hand.

Three things stood out: a big focus on instrument interoperability (shoutout @SiLAStandard, @UniteLabs_), new efforts to generate large experimental datasets (shoutout @AtinaryTech), and the big bet many are chasing – fully autonomous science (a la @Ginkgo x @OpenAI's recent collab on cell-free protein synthesis).

The excitement is real. And, so are the risks if we take our eyes off the less glamorous parts of the R&D process – like optimizing clinical trials.

Join me inside SLAS. Full vid: https://t.co/G7DPgIpAcu

[Meridian Labs @meridianlabs_ai]

Petri has a new home. The automated alignment auditing tool, originally built at Anthropic, is now developed and maintained at Meridian Labs. 3.0 ships today.

[Cloudflare @Cloudflare]

Cloudflare's security team spent the last few weeks testing Anthropic's Mythos against fifty of our own repositories. What we learned about offensive AI, why faster patching is the wrong reaction, and what the architecture around vulnerabilities has to look like next. https://t.co/RSrRtIhgaV

[SiLA Consortium @SiLAStandard]

Worth a watch! https://t.co/OJ29fLV3ZS

#SiLA is featured in this video!
Great overview from Dr. Patrick Courtney - worth checking out if you want to understand SiLA better!

@nabilwrites #standardization #labAutomation #SLAS2026

[Atinary Technologies Inc. @AtinaryTech]

Thrilled to speak with @nabilwrites @enginespod on how Atinary is generating high-quality experimental data that AI actually learns from.

Goal: accelerate R&D + redefine the economics of discovery with #SelfDrivingLabs #PhysicalAI 🚀

Take a look: https://t.co/VkPvPAkLxv

[SiLA Consortium @SiLAStandard]

@nabilwrites @SLAS_Org @UniteLabs_ Spot on Nabil!

[OpenAI Newsroom @OpenAINewsroom]

We’re introducing a Bio Bug Bounty for GPT‑5.5 and accepting applications

In our ongoing work to strengthen our safeguards for advanced AI capabilities in biology, we’re inviting researchers with experience in AI red teaming, security, or biosecurity to try to find a universal jailbreak that can defeat our 5-question bio safety challenge.

Learn more in our blog ⬇️
https://t.co/2vexvsX6Xy

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The people in this photo aren't friendlier than you. Their apartments are just smaller. So small that Parisians basically gave up on living indoors and moved their living rooms onto the sidewalk. And that was the whole plan.

In the 1850s, a city planner named Baron Haussmann tore apart medieval Paris and rebuilt it. He widened streets into boulevards, capped every building at five stories, and added one rule that explains this entire photo: the ground floor of every building had to be a café, a bakery, or a shop. The apartments above were intentionally tiny. Some were single rooms carved out of old mansions. No garden. Barely any sunlight. A private balcony was something most Parisians would never have.

So the café became home. You ate breakfast there. Held meetings there. Received your mail there. By the late 1700s, Paris already had close to 2,000 of them. In 2002, there were still 1,907. Even now, after years of closures brought that number to about 1,410, the coverage is absurd: a 2020 city study found 94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. When COVID shut indoor dining in 2020, Paris ripped out parking spaces, turned them into outdoor terraces, and let 9,800 cafés and restaurants keep them permanently.

An American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book in 1989 called The Great Good Place. He had a name for spots like the Parisian café: "third places." Not your home, not your office, but the casual in-between spots where you actually get to know people. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, the corner store where the owner knows your name. His whole argument was that American suburbs were built with only two zones, your house and your job, connected by a car. No sidewalk café, no place to bump into a neighbor by accident.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023. Being alone all the time is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults say they feel lonely. Weekly socializing dropped from 5.5 hours in 2003 to just 4 hours in 2023, and it never bounced back after COVID. Americans between 15 and 29 now spend 45% more time alone than they did in 2010.

The scene in this tweet looks like a personality trait. It is a 170-year-old engineering project that works exactly as designed.

[Nabil Laoudji @nabilwrites]

2 lights. 2 mics. 3 cameras + tripods.
What good is a recording studio if you can't haul it on a bike?
Recording day at Discovery Engines 📹🧬👾

[Nabil Laoudji @nabilwrites]

What is the case for autonomous labs in life science, really? Some thoughts. https://t.co/eYcFVPi4r0

[delian @zebulgar]

The coolest orbital animation I've seen of Artemis 2

Just really shows you how far away they're flying today and also how precise they need to be to go to the moon

[Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD (aka Aleksandrs Zavoronkovs) @biogerontology]

@nabilwrites @OmicsOmicsBlog @jrkelly @Ginkgo @jrkelly rocks

[Ginkgo Bioworks @Ginkgo]

@nabilwrites of the @enginespod got a tour Nebula, our autonomous lab, from our CEO @jrkelly.

See their conversation below and book a tour for yourself at: https://t.co/XRPhCwCJGR

[Jason Kelly @jrkelly]

Awesome chatting with @nabilwrites and link to a full 25 minute video tour of Nebula, our autonomous lab at @Ginkgo in🧵!!

[Nabil Laoudji @nabilwrites]

High-quality experimental data fuels biological discovery. Could an AI-enabled "autonomous lab" fundamentally increase the rate at which we generate it, and accelerate our progress toward cures for disease?

That's the question I sat down to explore with @jrkelly, CEO of @Ginkgo, for a deep-dive and tour of their 52-RAC lab in Boston's Seaport District.

In our conversation we covered:
→ Ginkgo's recent collaboration with @OpenAI on cell-free protein synthesis
→ @ENERGY's POTUS-backed Genesis Mission to accelerate AI for science
→ The evolution from cloud labs to truly autonomous labs
→ An on-the-floor look at Ginkgo's lab, including early challenges and creative workarounds

If you're curious about frontier AI models meet the lab bench, check out the latest episode of the Discovery Engines Podcast.

Watch or listen:
👀 YouTube: https://t.co/7NDUkWkttc
🎧 Spotify: https://t.co/i6DSLV7trp
🎧 Apple: https://t.co/HPfzMAW2xd