Just read CellularIntelligence white paper. Very strong. Couple technical and non-technical thoughts:
Non Technical
1/ Narrative. CZ has reach and resources due to Zuck. Arc is fabled and has mad clout, plus maybe collabs with Tahoe. Xaira raised a stupid amount of cash. Clearly they need to position themselves in the canon, and become a part of the lore. This was a great, clearly articulated way of doing so. An observation, but Lulu Cheng Meservy followed the CEO with low follow count hmmm is she behind it?
2/ Laying out the public roadmap is smart. Technical people (who they hope to recruit) are excited by the scope of work and difficulty of the problem. Your goal as a human is to rage, rage against the dying of the light. This aligns you with the meta-goal of living (we do too, and arguably more, comments on that soon)
Technical:
1/ they are absolutely correct in the framing of the problem. the goal is to learn a state transition function, ie the dynamics of the cell. Notably, they account (or try to) for context, which is where much of biological determinism is missing today. What I’m curious to know is how much the in vitro screening / their capsules translates to in vivo human biology
2/ TIME!! This is something I see neglected so often. You can’t sample dynamics without time. scRNA data that incorporates time has been super insightful, and they seem to get this. Very keen to see the movement from discrete time (good start) to the continuous time ODEs that we know the world occurs in
3/ I’m actually not super sure about their architecture. Not a ton of details, but I don’t think a LLM-like transformer is the eventual winner for reasons too long to explain here. But I’m sure they will innovate
The new year marks a new era: Somite is now Cellular Intelligence.
This is a statement of what we are building: the first universal virtual cell signaling-model to understand, predict, and control cell behavior.
To mark this moment, we’re releasing a white paper sharing technical milestones and our roadmap for the future:
cellularintelligence.com/sci…
Learn more about the future we are building – where biology is no longer destiny, but design:
cellularintelligence.com/