> ... until we at the very least give LLMs a direct way to interact with lab equipment and train them using RL on it.

Which is exactly what is being done.

https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...

Not according to Anthropic:

  Our lab, located in the Bay Area, looks like a typical molecular biology lab. We do research that involves only the lower-levels of the biosafety risk level (BSL-1 and BSL-2) and we do not handle pathogens that can infect humans. All of the lab work is performed by human scientists. Although we’ve experimented with using AI to accelerate lab work with initiatives like the Model Hardware Standard, this approach is less conducive to the sort of ad hoc workflows that are involved in our molecular biology research.