Live imaging is destructive — every frame you take costs the cell photons and phototoxicity, so you can’t watch everything at high resolution all the time. The intelligence that matters isn’t a sharper image; it’s knowing when to spend the budget. A microscope now runs a model on-the-fly, watches gently, and switches to the slow, expensive modality only at the instant something happens — and, at the frontier, closes the loop to act on the cell and drive it to a target state. This is our instrument’s micro-loop, and the field just grew up around it.
