Biology

“AI is kind of what Calculus did for physics. AI will do for biology in the sense that it'll help us weave back together lots of very complex pieces that build these complex systems that then have certain properties.”

“We're just nowhere near having enough training data for biology.”

“In a single cell, there's ten billion proteins that work so fast that one second is the equivalent of 80 years of humans walking around the city of Manhattan, never sleeping, doing stuff together. With 500 story tall skyscrapers doing stuff for 80 years is 1:0…”

“Well, I think materials are harder. So they have the benefit of like great simulators like that we don't have in bio. Like, in material science, you don't have the, like, mature, high-throughput automation that you have in biology. For me, materials as a subje…”

“You want to build a frontier AI lab, but you need to couple that with a frontier biology effort that can do the work of basically being able to understand and get the data that you need to actually be able to build these models, because unlike language models,…”

“We have these systems that can basically kind of predict the next token and they can, you know, learn, World models from that. They can learn biology from the data.”

“And I think that there's certain areas where venture investing hasn't worked before, where where there could be like category defining outcomes and where there could be you know, new kind of industries where, where smart people are actually interested in going…”

“As much as I love biology, we can't deploy it for every single solution. Chemistry wins a lot.”

“I'm very interested in biology in general, like very interested in some aspects that are hard tech because I've seen software engineering kind of becoming commoditized.”

“AI is going to mean the century of biology because finally all of this work that was spread across all these different journal papers can be synthesized and understood, right?”

“So rolling forward that software engineering self-improvement, I think you're going to have a system that can write complete repositories, identify bugs, refactor code, But it doesn't suddenly understand biology. Right? It's just like there's a domain gap ther…”

“And I said, wow, like, you know, AI is actually starting to work. It has some things in common with how the human brain works, but, you know, has the potential to be larger and scale better and learn tasks like biology. Maybe this is ultimately going to be the…”

“We can actually automate so much of the scientific method, because it turns out, especially in a field like biology, which is very empirical limited, you know, the top one percent guesser of, you know, what they think will happen in experiment that, you know, …”

“And so I think that that, for that reason, natural language is the only possible way to connect all the different pieces of data we need in biology, medicine, or any domain for that matter.”

“It definitely seems plausible, but there's a lot of other concerns there where it needs to It needs to be able to, like, actually do experiments, and get data, and interact with the real world for a lot of these in a way that does not need to happen at all for…”

“Every time I think about where the biggest breakthroughs and successes in biology came from, it was always served from some type of technology or process or technique and rarely from like discovering a new target.”

“It still seems like there could be a lot more effort in this space around building tools, and it's kind of this crazy thing that we're, you know, here in, you know, twenty-twenty-five, and there's not the kind of periodic table of elements equivalent for biolo…”

“I think that we're making a lot of progress on making AI better at deeper tasks like hard coding problems, hard math problems. But I suspect that there's a particular overhang in areas where putting together knowledge that maybe no one human expert would have,…”

“The vast majority of, you know, mechanistic data that's been generated to date is really made to ask very specific, very well scoped questions and just, you know, way more tokens per experiment is, you know, just, it's just going to be the way to do it.”

“The data and the technological needs of serving biology are very, very different. You have an incredibly complex multidimensional data model that's happening while the instrumentation lab is now, you know, vastly generating more, more data than ever, ever befo…”

“In biology, as you know, like, the best model you can build has, like, a figure of merit of accuracy, like.6, if it's .9, anything that looks great, there's something wrong.”

“I'm gonna bet that we will map biology in this way.”

“So it seems like the, you know, in general, I wouldn't be surprised if 20, 24 and 20, 25 is the year of proliferation of models where we're going to start to see an expansion in terms of the different types that are covered, you know, chemistry and material sc…”

“If there is one technology on this planet that can scale better than anything else we know of, it's biology.”

“And so I feel like these computer brains are going to kick our ass a lot faster in this domain than they do in English.”

“I don't have very high hopes for humanity to develop that conceptual understanding to the level that we would need it in order to do all the interventions we want to do.”

“This is probably the most important trajectory of what's underway in biology since the discovery of DNA.”

“And so ultimately there's only so much that you can speed up biology in certain cases because biology takes as long as it takes.”

“There's no reason why a 120 needs to be the maximum human lifespan. There is nothing in biology that says that there is a limit, and there are many species that live a lot longer than us.”

“And the contention that I have today is that we are at a point and just past a cusp where there are new general purpose technology platforms that are going to supplant the ones that define the 20th century. And those are the broad technology platforms of compu…”

“I think the greatest battle in climate tech over the next decade is going to be a race between electrochemistry and biology to solve our biggest climate problems.”

“Probably 80% of the things we need to do in climate tech can be solved either by biologically or electrochemically converting Thing X into thing Y.”

“Biology is too complex to be understood by a human brain at a holistic or intuitive level for even a single cell.”

“Everyone talks about rocket science being the hard problem about outer space, but biology is the really hard thing about outer space.”

“It is ultimately chemistry and physics. I mean, there's no, I don't believe in any vital spirit Or soul, or anything like that. I'm sure some people do, but I don't, I mean, to me, it's all material. It's gonna ultimately be understood in purely materialistic,…”

“So if you think of four permutations of relationship, there's win-win, win-lose, lose-lose, lose-win, but in, if we map that to biology, only one of those survives across time, right? Which is, the relationship has to be win-win”

“Secondly, often biology has very small data sets and that's a real challenge and a differentiator from other areas in AI.”

“So about 25% of what we're doing as a fund, I'd say, is within the Renaissance and biology area right now.”

“Biology is kind of where computer science was like late sixties, early seventies, which is we're about to see like this whole new set of technologies that will dramatically change the costs and the automation and the price curves for a lot of these things.”

“I think in many ways this century is going to be the century of biology, and really to put point on it, I think it's going to be the century of synthetic biology”

“You just see breakthroughs in biology and chemistry, in astrophysics. Coming out of various forms of machine learning. So all of a sudden it becomes this tool that is applicable to a whole range of things and is changing those fields.”

“We're still not in the large, large data regime where, you know, blind architectures that don't exploit structure of the problem can just work out of the box. So you really have to understand your problem domain and figure out how to exploit the structure that…”

“But I think mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, material science, computer science, all these disciplines are pushing into biology. And so instead of steel, it's bone or it's muscle. But the same principles actually carry over really nicely.”

“It's really just one subset of what we think is the broader theme here, which is the shift away from biology being primarily an empirical or an experimental science to becoming more of an engineered discipline.”

“What we're really seeing emerging are new founders, Founders that also live in both of these worlds. Founders that have deep experience in the biology and deep experience in computer science, and actually, for these types of companies, I think that's going to …”

“I think what we're going to start to see is the literal engineering of biological circuits inside cells. The ability to design circuits, much like we design electronic circuits. And the reason why this is important is that there's only so much you can do by ha…”

“Biology is no longer an industry in and of itself. It's something that's going to touch every single industry, and we're already seeing applications in energy, in textiles, in food, of course in health, and in data storage.”

“We believed, Biology is eating the world. Literally every portion of it.”

“I think mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, material science, computer science, all these disciplines are pushing into biology, and so instead of steel, it's bone, or it's muscle, but the same principles actually carry over really nicely, and if yo…”

“When you have biology as a design medium, it's about making things possible that you didn't even know were possible.”

“If you break it up into little bits, any little bit isn't so bad. And can be engineered. And you sort of do it step by step by step by step. And I think that's, for me, the inspiration for how to take some big crazy thing like going to the moon, that if you di…”

“Opportunities where we now finally can engineer biology the way we engineer other areas.”

“And if you think about it, biology is all about technical debt. Biology is trying to get that MVP out. You're trying to, like, survive the T-Rex coming after you. You know, you're not gonna be able to make things perfect.”

“I think you might be seeing where I'm going with this, is that that's a lot like what we have to do in biology. You know, we have to get into the code which is a mess and understand it, and just understanding the code of biology is something extremely difficul…”

“And when you talk to a biologist, and I think what we're starting to realize is that there's a fundamental conclusion that comes from this, is that biology is so complicated that it's probably beyond what the human being can understand.”

“I think what we expect to see is the shift from many areas that used to be areas of science risk through engineering mechanisms and machine learning now become really engineering problems. With that in mind, we can finally understand and tackle the technical d…”

“As we move beyond software, we're at this point where we're seeing this incredible convergence between biology, computer science, and engineering. And it's this convergence that's going to give us broad new superpowers to understand and manipulate biology. Ess…”

“So we're living at this incredible point in time where biology is going to look a lot like information technology, and that it's going to be able to tackle and transform and perhaps even disrupt multiple industries.”

“Modularity is a hallmark of both biology and technology.”

“Having those two skill sets makes you, like, There's, you will have no problem getting started in the industry just because there are very few people who have both vocabularies and the kind of opportunities in it are so big, so I, like, I don't think you can m…”