Now that you mentions labs, he spent the last 10 years of his career (maybe more, I don't remember clearly) working at a food analysis lab and there was a lot of waiting for results there, but it is what it is, microorganisms take their time to grow and no LLM in the world can make them go faster.
Rate limited by biology. Love that.
You mean the microbes have to double n-times (to get sufficient numbers of microbes) before tests can be run on them.
But maybe the LLMs figure out a way to run those tests on microbes that have only doubled 0.1(n-times).
You could then think of the LLMs as being a more honest version of Elizabeth Holmes.
You could try shortening the time to 6 or 12 hours, but then
1) if something grew then the food was contaminated, but if it didn't, how can you be sure it is good or you just didn't wait enough? You would get a lot of false negatives.
2) the lab followed a normal 8 hours a day schedule, so nobody would be there to analize the results. You would not gain anything.