Why the robotic arm helped less than changing equipment
From 20 Years of R&D. Matched in 3 Months by 2 Friends. on Deeptech Decoded, with Advaith Sridhar.
Transcript
because in three months, we were able to discover these terminal interface materials that are.
on par with what Dow, Honeywell and Henkel are selling today. Dow, Honeywell, Henkel, these guys are like the three big players in the market. They've been making this for over 20 years. They've probably spent millions of dollars of R &D on it. And
Mm.
me and Akash were able to do this in three months out of a garage lab in Oakland, which I thought was super cool.
Kudos for that.
Yeah, all of their materials that they use are also proprietary. they don't like, there aren't even patents on these materials because they don't want anyone to know.
what goes into making them. So I think it was super cool that we were able to do that.
The
one thing we learned while doing this is that I think the approach that's the consensus today is possibly incorrect. The current consensus approach is, we need these self-driving labs, and we need to do everything autonomously, have these closed synthesis loops
Mm.
where people are making materials. However,
None of the gains that we saw came from a self-driving lab. We did buy a robotic arm, and we had these experiments running where the arm was moving things around and mixing things and getting results. That wasn't very useful. What was useful for us was actually modifying the equipment each time.
Actually, this is one of the most surprising parts of your white paper that taking a look again from scratch, first principles, okay, what are the equipment, what are the processes other than the things that we can in a logical level improve? That I was I
Mm-hmm.
was actually quite surprised because I thought you were going heavy on, okay, we are gonna do the combinations much faster, more efficient way. let you continue.
I think that helps in
computation, where you do the combinations really fast and so on. But in experiment, all of our gains came from not automating a process, but constantly changing the process.
Mm.
So we switched from magnetic stirrers to mixers, we switched from mixers to furnaces, we switched from furnaces to blade coating, and they're all completely different processes. And each of them is what gave us the step jump in performance. I think this is also true.
