building zeroshot bio // previously co-founded acorn biolabs, YC 2016
Vancouver, British Columbia
Joined September 2012
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“An approach we call distributed biological reasoning.”
Slowly but surely, AI is absorbing the shared intuition of the world’s great biologists.
We won’t *just* get valuable new findings from existing bio data — we’ll also begin to more deeply understand how to make highly effective *new* bio data.
So exciting!
GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration?
DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in making cholesterol. GPT-Rosalind suggested a possible explanation: cholesterol may not be reaching where neurons need it.
That gives scientists a specific mechanism to test and, if confirmed, a direction for developing new treatments for neurodegenerative disorders.
With @perturbai_tx and @scrippsresearch, a team of thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents worked in parallel, connecting gene-expression results from millions of mouse brain cells with scientific literature in just 32 minutes. We’re now expanding this collaboration to identify new drug targets.
openai.com/index/scaling-ai-…
Our team just minted a 1-million-cell drug-response dataset.. in zebrafish.
I'll be in San Francisco Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
I'd love to meet AI folks interested in modeling biology.
DMs open
Well articulated 🫡
Building toward a true 'bio-generalization' North Star is what gets people excited.
Recalibrating expectations toward mini-generalization wins along the way is the road to effective progress. Ideally, we can balance hype with bite-sized utility year-by-year
With all of the money and research pouring into AI, I'm surprised we don't have more awesome (in the original 'eliciting wonder' sense of the word) visualizations of what trillion-parameter neural networks really 'look' like on the inside..
Yeah!
As I've begun to develop an intuition on the limits of AI, I've had to incorporate concepts as far out as the philosophy of knowledge, as 'practical' as brain surgery, and as basic as statistics.
I bet we’re going to discover many very useful abstractions on the long road to ‘full AI’ understanding.
Some of biology’s most reliable, important patterns won’t require atom-by-atom reconstruction to be effectively learned.
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If you enjoyed reading Isaac Asimov's robot stories, I guarantee section 7 of the Claude Mythos Model Card will tantalize you.
It reads like Dr. Susan Calvin -- Asimov's fictional 'chief robopsychologist' -- dissecting the mind of yet another robot gone awry.
couldn't agree more.
1. human relationships
2. artistic creation
3. scientific exploration
these three will remain the most engaging, meaningful categories of human activity post-ASI (i think..)
I think most people should consider becoming scientists.
While there is a real risk AI will eliminate jobs, conversely the need for models to understand the world around us through more and better data will increase exponentially.
AlphaFold, for example, would not have been possible if not for the work of thousands of grad students and postdocs painstakingly depositing well-curated datasets over decades of meticulous experimental work.
We still only understand a fraction of the physical world and beyond, and we’ll only be able to do so if we collect more data and put it into context.
Maybe this is a bit naive or utopian thinking, but humans are not designed to look through pages of receipts, read 100-page legal documents, or write reports and POCs no one will ever read. They are wired to explore, driven by curiosity, and have an innate desire to understand the world.
Many who are bored or feel a lack of purpose -- with the overhanging (and maybe exaggerated) doom and gloom of AI replacement -- should think about this.
We need even more enthusiasm-fueling art.
Using great art to communicate the 'awe and wonder' behind why we build not only helps society-at-large understand our motives, it also makes the journey that much more aesthetically wonderful for ourselves.
Thank you A16Z 🫡
More intelligent models should not only be capable of producing simulations like these, they should also be capable of evolving the environments and variables themselves toward undiscovered categories of useful new patterns.
"artificial interestingness selection"
Science fiction is science vision.
The very first short story in I, Robot is about a young girl’s heartache after being separated from her loving robot..
Surreal to see it happen for real this year:
Very lucky to have been invited - @1517fund fuels the spirit of young scientific/technological pioneers better than any other. 🌲🏕️
Kudos
In SF this week.
I’ve closed a pre-seed.
Would love to chat with bio foundation modellers.
Any leads?
Contributing to Donald’s filmic ambitions was such a treat 🤘
Congrats @donaldjewkes on making such a hit!
we pull in marketing talent like @ntaforster to help tear apart our screenplay for the 11th time
and @steventen to help us analyze references like tarrence mallick, hardcore henry, "tokyo pov", smack my ***** up, project X, city of god, and casino royale
steven just happens to own an arri alexa, the camera they use to shoot skyfall
