building zeroshot bio // prev. co-founded acorn biolabs, YC 2016

Joined September 2012
108 Photos and videos
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
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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
Replying to @anshulkundaje
We need to continue to be honest about what our models are actually capable of and where they fail so we keep moving forward. Less hype & blind faith in parameters & arbitrary scaling. More evidence based strategies & honest reflection. 6/6
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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..
This is what the AI brain looks like.
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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.
Hot take: machine learning and AI did more to understand the nature of knowledge, and our relation to reality than 20 centuries of philosophy. I am ready to kind of defend this hill.
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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.
Every time I tell AI utopianists that biology is too complex for AI to "solve", they cite the success of AlphaFold. No, AlphaFold did not "solve" protein folding. It gets broad structures correct ~70-88% of the time (depending on evaluation), enabling useful but flawed statistical guesses. True "solving" would require ~99.9% accuracy, practically zero meaningful edge cases, and high confidence across fine details like side chains and conformations. Even then, this is just one narrow slice of the complexities of proteomics. The persistent gap between the "AlphaFold solved protein folding" claim and reality is a perfect example of AI overhype in biology.
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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.
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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.
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How long before lab technicians are prompted through protocols by lab-AIs? Scientist-in-the-loop.
claude is independently connected to a plate reader and writing a PyLabRobot interface to it
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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 🫡
Jan 9
It's time to build.
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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"
18 Dec 2025
the secret life of boids using gemini 3 flash to simulate simple rules that lead to emergent behaviours (attraction, repulsion, cohesion)
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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:
A Chinese father's video of his daughter tearfully saying goodbye to her broken Al learning robot. People already get emotionally attached to AI. Now imagine Figure03 at home and it breaks, people will have a breakdown.
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Very lucky to have been invited - @1517fund fuels the spirit of young scientific/technological pioneers better than any other. 🌲🏕️ Kudos
1517 Unplugged was a hit! Founders, community members, teens, LPs -- can't wait to host again next year.
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In SF this week. I’ve closed a pre-seed. Would love to chat with bio foundation modellers. Any leads?
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Anyone from @cziscience or @arcinstitute would be amazing to chat with.
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Contributing to Donald’s filmic ambitions was such a treat 🤘 Congrats @donaldjewkes on making such a hit!
10 Sep 2025
Replying to @donaldjewkes
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
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Don't underestimate how immersive virtual reality will become.
31 Aug 2025
I asked nano banana to take me across Middle-earth and this is what happened... all the details on how I made this video, below 🧵👇
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i like music
Replying to @steventen
@steventen dropped another banger at @NovusOrg
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