Patil: Eli Lilly was an early design partner for Chai's V1
Neil Patil · 🔬They Thought the Model Was Broken — Matt McPartlon & Neil Patil, Chai Discovery · Aug 11, 2026 · at 40:49
Neil Patil, Head of Platform at Chai Discovery, discusses partnering with pharmaceutical companies to build Chai's molecular design software platform.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We'd been working with you know or talking to Eli Lilly and, you know, they were, you know one of the first partners to really work with us closely on that kind of you know, it made that V one of that that design suite, right. That you can use to engineer some of those molecules on.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Neil Patil
Patil: Enterprise cybersecurity buyers are surprisingly non-technical and unsophisticated
“I come from a cybersecurity background or, you know, have worked on security products before and those were dark, dark years because you spend a lot of your time actually selling to people who are surprisingly not that technical. You think cybersecurity people…”
Patil: Biomolecular AI models will be as massive and impactful as LLMs
“And, you know, I think this class of models is going to be like just as big, just as impactful as LLMs, but it's almost like the compute market, like kind of doesn't realize that yet, both in the capacity sense, but also in like the software stack sense.”
Patil: Chai operates as a neutral software factory for medicines
“There's a lot of bio companies, AI for bio companies that are like making their own drugs. We really don't see ourselves that way, right? We see ourselves as almost a neutral software factory. For making medicines.”
Patil: Generative models enable atom-level precise antibody epitope design
“And I think, like, one of the things that's really exciting about where we're getting to with some of these models is we can start to get that precise, right? Epitope, right? Meaning like binding spot, right? A very specific set of atoms to have the antibody g…”
Patil: Chai-2 crossed the performance threshold for antibody design last year
“The ultimate goal here is to design medicines, right, and design new molecules, and I think CHI-2 really crossed the threshold of performance for doing that with antibodies a year ago.”
Patil: Enterprise software lifespans have shrunk from 20 years to one year
“Like maybe you'd have built software that was supposed to last like 20 years. Now it's supposed to last maybe one year, but it is the bridge to deliver value and kind of enable the research that then gets you to the next thing.”