Co-founder & CEO - Plasmidsaurus 🦕🦖🧬 The only real DNA Sequencing as a Service company
South San Francisco, CA
Joined June 2009
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- Following2.8K
- Followers4.4K
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Come build with us and accelerate the entirety of biotech.
plasmidsaurus.com/careers
Mark Budde 🦕🏆 retweeted
there will be within the next few years stunning advances in biology. there will whole new ways to think about what biological study even means. i would be only mildly surprised if there were near term solutions to problems like cancer, neurodegenerative disease, etc
Over 2 pounds of Nints! Indimrvally wrapped! Cannabis buds in the background.
Thanks @amazon
Mark Budde 🦕🏆 retweeted
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
Neurons directly encode feelings and concepts. Was this the problem with the previous opus claude speak? Was it maximizing token efficiency by activating these neurons directly, which is unreadable to us?
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Tonight they are shutting down the old Burbank terminal - lucky to be one of the final passengers to land. We'll see how the new terminal stacks up on Wednesday. So long and thanks for the super fast security line. 🛬
As I use AI to interpret the significance of superhuman AI math results, I feel deeply, deeply strange. Feels like stepping into the singularity.
Mark Budde 🦕🏆 retweeted
All this renaming has me thinking Synthetic Biology could be more awesome.
From now on we do
ALT ULTRABIO
Mark Budde 🦕🏆 retweeted
Plasmidsaurus for everything / more and more things! I think this is a good near term solution
A friend posted on Nextdoor with an absurdly specific list of what she wanted in a house. The comments were flooded with people mocking her for being unrealistic.
One person DMed her.
She got exactly the house she wanted, under market.
wrote out a list of who I’m looking for.
X, work your magic.
non negotiable
- 35 to 42 y/o
- healthy masculine
- smart, funny, lighthearted
- provider/protector mentality
- post economic (still hardworking)
- must be kind, generous, thoughtful
- no kids yet, decidedly wants kids
- on the healing path (history of serious commitment ex therapists, books, retreats)
- can meet anywhere but will not date unless live in the same city
- fit and sober because you care about your health
strongly preferred
- no prev marriages or engagements
- works in tech (comfortable with risk and career is blended into personal life)
Mark Budde 🦕🏆 retweeted
People say the Boston Marathon route is the most important route in the city, but to us? It’s the dropbox route. 😎 Watch our Plasmidsaurus dino cover the Boston sample pickup route and see if you recognize anyone!
A special thank you to the customers featured: Eric Lander Lab, Jim Collins Lab, Stephen Blacklow Lab, Vijay Sankaran Lab, Ryan Flynn Lab, Sanofi, Deep Genomics, Ginkgo Bioworks, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Flagship Pioneering, Boston Children's Hospital, and CRISPR Therapeutics.
Same-day results on Whole Plasmid, Amplicon, & ZeroPrep Colony Sequencing...and speed is just the start!
- Built to handle the most complex samples
- Service you can rely on
- Intuitive interactive reports
Trusted by all 50 top NIH-funded institutions, Addgene, every Ivy League, ~99% of NCI-designated cancer centers, and ~95% of US R1 universities.
Send your samples via a dropbox today! No Dropbox, no problem — request one via plasmidsaurus.com/?utm_sourc… for Boston or beyond.
Mark Budde 🦕🏆 retweeted
On behalf of the Intercept team, I’m excited to share that we’re launching our first “Request for Candidates”! We’re looking for the best science (and teams!) in the world that could plausibly meet our target product concept. Our ultimate goal is to radically reduce the burden of respiratory viruses, and an easy-to-use, safe, and effective preventative is a critical part of that puzzle.
This request for candidates will be open until at least December 31st, but proposals received by October 12 will be prioritized.
interceptfund.com/apply/broa…
Today I visited @NOETIK_ai headquarters in South SF, with @Ronalfa. Incredibly impressive. I haven't been this excited about a company in while - exactly how real bio AI companies should be operating. 🔥
Am I the only one who doesn’t understand why we need data centers?
I spent all morning searching Google and Wikipedia and couldn’t find a single good reason. Then I watched a 45-minute YouTube explainer in 4K, but it was mostly about AI, and I’m just waiting for that bubble to pop.
I opened 200 browser tabs, downloaded a few hundred research papers, translated three from Chinese, and uploaded 2TB of sequencing data so colleagues in eight countries could analyze it with me. Then we discussed the results on Zoom while Slack transcribed the meeting and emailed everyone a summary.
Around lunch, my phone backed up 14,000 family photos, synchronized my contacts and calendar across six devices, routed me around traffic, checked the weather using live satellite data, booked a doctor’s appointment, refilled a prescription, paid a bill, transferred money between banks, approved payroll for hundreds of employees, and ordered groceries.
Later, I read about hospitals retrieving patient records and medical scans in seconds, emergency services coordinating disaster responses, scientists designing protein therapies and sharing enormous datasets, utilities balancing the electrical grid, and airlines continuously rerouting thousands of flights.
But these all felt like pretty niche edge cases.
So I asked an AI agent to turn everything I had done that day into a Twitter post, make it increasingly insane and obvious, and optimize it for maximum engagement.
This is the best discussion on the state of AI in biotech. Sober, rational, grounded by two people who know it deeply, but don't have agenda. You should listen to it!
open.substack.com/pub/ashlee…
