Patrick Hsu, co-founder of the Arc Institute, contrasts the commercial value created by GLP-1 metabolic drugs with forty years of venture-backed biotech startups.
Opinion
Hsu: AI pharma commercial pitches outpace fundamental research breakthroughs
“I think in many ways the kind of pitch and the framing of these companies precedes The fundamental research capability breakthroughs.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hsu: Current AI biological models are at GPT-1 or GPT-2 capability levels
“I find it helpful to frame these in terms of like GPT one, two, three, four, five capabilities, right? And I think most people would agree we're somewhere between GPT one and two, right?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hsu: Physical synthesis and testing will remain AI drug discovery's bottleneck
“If we play this out, right? And let's say these AI models work, right? And you can make a trillion binders in silico that will, you know, be exquisite drug matter, right? We still need to make these things physically and test them in animals and hopefully pred…”
Insight
Hsu: Virtual cell models do not need mechanistic explanations to be useful
“And I would say similarly with a virtual cell model, it may not tell me literally why, just like a alpha fold doesn't tell me literally why did the protein fold this way and how, but it just told me the end state and it was reasonably accurate. I think that wo…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hsu: Arc Institute's moonshot is building virtual cells using foundation models
“Our moonshot is really to make virtual cells at Arc and simulate human biology with foundation models, and, you know, we'd like to figure out something that feels useful for experimentalists, people who are skeptical about technology, you know, they just want …”
Insight
Hsu: Academic incentives actively discourage cross-disciplinary research collaboration
“Folks have their own incentive structures, right? They need to publish their own papers. They need to do their own thing and, you know, make their own discovery and, You're not really incentivized to work together.”