Jun 17, 2026

🔬 The Limits of AI in Science - Why We Need Self-Driving Labs — Joseph Krause, Radical AI

Joseph Krause, CEO of Radical AI, details how his company uses Self-Driving Labs (SDLs) and AI scientists to overcome the experimental bottleneck in materials science. By automating the full loop of hypothesis generation, synthesis, characterization, and testing, Radical AI is accelerating the discovery of novel alloys for aerospace, defense, and semiconductor applications, achieving 10x the pace of traditional methods. Krause explains why materials science is uniquely challenging for AI, how human intuition trains the AI, and why experimental data, not models, forms the core competitive advantage in this rapidly evolving, geopolitically significant field.

Mar 13, 2026

Solving the Wrong Problem Works Better - Robert Lange

Robert Lange from Sakana AI discusses Shinka Evolve, a framework combining LLMs with evolutionary algorithms for open-ended program search. The conversation explores how Shinka Evolve addresses the limitations of systems like AlphaEvolve by co-evolving problems and solutions, its sample-efficient architecture using UCB bandits and quality-diversity search, and its applications in circle packing, competitive programming, and evolving MoE loss functions. The discussion also delves into the philosophical debate on whether these systems produce true novelty or are parasitic on their starting conditions, and the future role of the "AI Scientist" as a human co-pilot.