Neil Patil (Head of Platform at Chai Discovery) explains the company's business model to RJ Haneke and why major pharma companies partner with Chai.
Opinion
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Supported
Patil: Chai-2 demonstrated precise antibody-based GPCR agonist activity
“For example, in CHI-II, we showed like GPCR agonist activity, right? Where you can really hit the switch on a, you know, on a cell doorbell protein, so to speak, right? In a very precise way. Very, very, very hard to do that with antibodies if you can't be tha…”