Advertise on podcast: The Innermost Loop with Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross

The miracle of discovery is being deprecated by the Singularity. OpenAI and Red Queen Bio have put GPT-5 in charge of a wet lab, where it directed humans and robots to invent a cloning protocol 79x more efficient than standard methods. It isn't just optimizing biology; it's accelerating hardware: Quilter's AI designed a two-board computer system in less than a week, compressing a quarterly engineering cycle into a few days. But the wonder is fading. Terry Tao compares the new era of AI-driven proofs to a magic trick where "awe... can dissipate (or transform to technical respect) once one learns how the trick was performed," signaling that the "magic" of mathematics is becoming a standard industrial process.