AI for Life Sciences at Anthropic. Former drug target hunter at Genentech and Bayer. Recovering marine biologist. Always an evolutionist. Views are my own.

Joined June 2016
19 Photos and videos
Sometimes you goof....and then you fix it.
We’re rolling out changes to make Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development visible. Starting this week, flagged requests will visibly fall back to Opus 4.8—the same as our safeguards for cyber and bio. You will see this every time it happens. On the API, any flagged requests will return a reason for their refusal (coming to server-side fallback in the next few days). We wanted to deploy Fable 5 to our users quickly and safely. Visible safeguards can be probed, so they have to be robust, which takes time to get right. Invisible safeguards can be targeted more narrowly, allowing us to ship quickly with very few false positives. We went with invisible safeguards for this reason—and that was the wrong tradeoff. You should have visibility into the safeguards we have in place, and why. We’re sorry for not getting the balance right. Making the safeguards visible makes them easier to work around, so keeping them robust to jailbreaks will unfortunately mean more false positives while we improve the classifiers. We're also tuning our bio and cyber classifiers to trigger less often on harmless requests. We know this is frustrating and we’ll do our best to keep this period as short as possible. If you think a request has been mistakenly flagged: run /feedback in Claude Code, click thumbs-down on the fallback in Claude.ai or Cowork, or file the safeguard appeal form for API requests. Your reports help us tune these classifiers and we appreciate your feedback. support.claude.com/en/articl…
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Just....leaving this here....
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David Garfield (@dagarfield@mstdn.social and post) retweeted
Today we’re launching Claude Fable 5, a Mythos-class model made safe for general use. Fable 5 is far better than any model we’ve ever released on long-running tasks. Disentangling bio capabilities from risks is hard, so Fable 5 ships with safeguards that block responses in biology. These queries will receive responses from Claude Opus 4.8. We're investing in lab-grounded red-teaming so our biosafety calibration reflects actual threat models. That’s how we'll drive down false positive rates without lowering the bar on risks. We also plan to open a trusted access program soon for select life science organizations to access Mythos-class models for biology and chemistry use. Personally, Fable 5 has completely changed the way I work. Claude’s vision is now the best in the industry. I routinely let Fable cook for hours at a time on complex tasks without checking in, and it makes sensible choices. I’m excited to see what users do with this model. As always, my advice is to try a bunch of hard tasks that have never been possible before and see what you find. This is also the first model release that my team has had a small part in, just two months after joining @AnthropicAI. I’m insanely proud of our team and grateful to everyone at Anthropic who has jumped in to collaborating with us, especially to folks who are brand new to the wild world of biology and drug development. More soon.
Introducing Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use. Its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.
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David Garfield (@dagarfield@mstdn.social and post) retweeted
Our team has a position in the SF bay area for a top computational experimental scientist for perturb-seq. illumina.wd1.myworkdayjobs.c…

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And then sometimes, the field just changes. How wonderful.
Cheers, chills, and a standing ovation when RASolute 302 showed unprecedented survival on daraxonrasib for patients with progressive pancreatic cancer Seldom do you sense you’re witnessing a historic moment in cancer care but this feels like ras targeting has arrived #ASCO26
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this is pretty cool!
Replying to @arjunrajlab
Code: github.com/arjunrajlaborator… Also, note that this uses our new data analysis skill, mycelium, which I think is pretty cool: github.com/arjunrajlaborator…
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Last week was my last week at @genentech. It was an amazing 5 years. And now...something new! I've joined Beneficial Deployments and the AI for Life Sciences team at @AnthropicAI. Looking forward to continuing science conversations in this new role.
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David Garfield (@dagarfield@mstdn.social and post) retweeted
May 26
Excited to share Decima, out now in @naturemethods! 🎉 Existing seq-to-function models predict bulk expression. Decima goes further: it predicts gene expression in specific cell types and disease states from DNA sequence alone — trained on 22M single cells. Applications: cis-regulatory mechanisms, cell-type-resolved variant effect prediction, and designing context-specific regulatory DNA
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Money well spent
A new medical school, the first in a century, is coming to the Bay Area thanks to a gift from Nvidia billionaire Mark Stevens and his wife Mary. It's a partnership between Sutter Health and Santa Clara University - two miles down the road from Nvidia HQ: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Actually, really listen to this. He's very good.
if you are interested in the space of AI genetics -- I'm always looking for students and postdocs...
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David Garfield (@dagarfield@mstdn.social and post) retweeted
Population geneticists! Come work at 23andMe! New role just posted. 23andme.wd5.myworkdayjobs.co…

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Sometimes, you just have to stop looking at the computer and think about what a weird and wonderful world this is and has been.
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This is such careful and interesting science. Also, I'm not sleeping tonight.
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David Garfield (@dagarfield@mstdn.social and post) retweeted
Excited to share our new work on why immunotherapy does not work well in prostate cancer, and how this biology points to our new treatment strategy! This work was led by Abbas Nazir, myself and @ziyu__lu, from Aviv Regev’s group @Genentech. Keywords: perturbation, organoids, spatial biology, tumor microenvironment, AI agent Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
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I have done exactly this (with much less competency). Good way to learn a topic though.
- Drafted a blog post - Used an LLM to meticulously improve the argument over 4 hours. - Wow, feeling great, it’s so convincing! - Fun idea let’s ask it to argue the opposite. - LLM demolishes the entire argument and convinces me that the opposite is in fact true. - lol The LLMs may elicit an opinion when asked but are extremely competent in arguing almost any direction. This is actually super useful as a tool for forming your own opinions, just make sure to ask different directions and be careful with the sycophancy.
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David Garfield (@dagarfield@mstdn.social and post) retweeted
This is totally out of control: There’s 0 - I repeat 0 - evidence any of the LLM work did anything meaningful for Rosie’s cancer I’m sorry to rain on the parade here. I know we want to believe. But, it’s possible to do a lot of things and have nothing happen @paul_conyngham co-administered α-PD-1 (conventional immunotherapy) with a TKI and the mRNA. It’s probably the most effective cancer immunotherapy of all time. This isn’t a small detail! There’s no evidence his process (beyond FDA approved doggie α-PD-1) had any impact on disease progression. The most parsimonious explanation is a partial response to α-PD-1 I get it. The chat bots make for a great story (although checking multiple LLMs isn’t validation), but it’s really just a neat story. It’s fundraising copy. Before he starts selling the “custom neoantigen mRNA vax” story to consumers, he should provide some evidence it did anything! That’s responsible citizen science This is just storytelling for the AGI true believers. Specifically, a story in search of venture money
Mar 27
The coolest meeting I had this week with was Paul, who used ChatGPT and other LLMs to create an mRNA vaccine protocol to save his dog Rosie. It is amazing story. "The chat bots empowered me as an individual to act with the power of a research institute - planning, education, troubleshooting, compliance, and yes, real scientific design work in converting genomic data to a vaccine prescription and designing the treatment protocol around it. But they worked alongside humans at every step. The combination is what made it possible." It immediately got me thinking "this should be a company". Also, Paul is an extraordinary guy. This should be easy to do, but it is not yet.
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Keep your eyes here
The Programmable Genomics Lab at @UMassGCB just officially launched our site! We have a "simple" goal: to develop synthetic regulatory elements that target every cell type in every tissue, and control payload dosage/duration Check it out! programmable-genomics.github…
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David Garfield (@dagarfield@mstdn.social and post) retweeted
We're hiring a postdoc in my group at @calico! We develop deep learning methods for regulatory genomics to predict how every nucleotide in the genome affects cell-type-specific gene regulation.
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David Garfield (@dagarfield@mstdn.social and post) retweeted
[Postdoc Opportunity] Interested in research at the intersection of AI, regulatory genomics, and plant biology? Ware Lab and Koo Lab at CSHL are seeking a highly motivated postdoc fellow to pioneer this space! - Fully funded: Must be US citizens! - DM or email me CV Please RT!
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