I wish we could discuss this in a way that didn't immediately devolve into people shouting up or shouting down that this is either meaningless or singularity.

Caveating I'm not a biologist, but my understanding of the way this kind of thing works right now is a basic three-step process:

1) Find molecules and DNA/RNA sequences in the wild and catalog them.

2) Discover interesting subsequences among these.

3) Figure out whether any useful applications can come from what was discovered.

All three of these generally take a long time. Systematic automatic analysis of known databases speeds up and removes some of the luck from 2. But 1 and 3 are still long poles. 1 has the further issue that we usually discover these in existing organisms. I recall much of the outcry over tropical deforestation back in the 90s and replacing of rainforests with palm oil monoculture today is that the vast majority of terrestrial biodiversity is found in rainforests, and destroying them at industrial scale risks losing potentially useful molecules forever. 3 has the problem that you need to conduct physical experiments, and are limited by the speed of biochemical reactions no matter what and by the speed at which human subjects can be found and ethically experimented on assuming we care about being ethical.

A lot of good can come of this, but I don't see a path to singularity here, assuming we're talking the original Kurzweil meaning there of all technological progress that will ever happen all happening at once. Data collection and experimentation on living subjects, human or not, can only happen so fast, regardless of automation. It's not computational. Whenever you have to interface with the real world, you're now working at the speed of the real world, not the speed of electricity. CRISPR was discovered in 1987 and first used to edit a gene sequence in a human zygote in 2015. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to make the candidate discovery to human application step not take three decades, but it's never going to be three months, either.

I agree, this is a cool result, but not something far out or extremely novel. It's discovering a new class of things that is different from other similar things we already knew about. One of those similar things we already knew about (CRISPER) turned out to be better than other tools we have for editing DNA in vivo, so that makes it potentially more exciting, but others haven't had the same application. It's interesting because the function is unknown, and you're right there's a lot of followup to figure out just exactly what is going on and why, much less to come up with an idea for how to use it to do something cool.

To me this strikes me as an incremental discovery that would have taken someone with time, interest, and expertise to make before. It could have cool applications or it could just be interesting biology. Molecular biology has progressed through many years and many rounds of automation and new tools, but the problems are still hard. This just strikes me as one more way we may be able to speed up one part of the process.