Wet lab
A laboratory with physical equipment for handling biological or chemical material, as opposed to research done entirely on computers.
A wet lab is the kind of laboratory most people picture: benches, fume hoods, pipettes, fridges full of samples, people in coats actually handling substances. The name exists to distinguish it from a dry lab, where the only equipment is computers and the work is simulation, modelling and data analysis.
The distinction matters in AI news because it marks the line between proposing something and testing it. A model can read every paper in a field and produce a hypothesis that is elegant, well argued and completely wrong, and there is no way to find out which without doing the experiment. When an AI company opens a wet lab, it is buying itself a way to check.