Joshua Meier, co-founder of Chai Discovery, explains why Chai benchmarked its Chai-2 model across over 50 targets instead of following typical academic AI drug discovery standards.
“Most of the existing papers in this area of doing AI for drug discovery are usually looking at like one, two or three targets.”
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More from Joshua Meier
AssertionSupported
Meier: Chai-2 maintains success rate on targets with 25% sequence similarity
“We actually even have a slide in our paper in the supplement where we actually look at an even harder subset. So not looking at things that are, you know, up to a sequence similarity with the model, but actually pushing all the way down to 25%. So really looki…”
Joshua MeierJul 3, 2025▶ 17:23No Priors Ep. 121 | With Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Meier: Clinical interest in traditional monoclonal antibodies will decline
“So what we predict will happen is people probably won't be as interested in, in the clinic for things like monoclonal antibodies. These are, you know, antibodies that are hitting, for example, like a specific epitope on a protein.”
Joshua MeierJul 3, 2025▶ 27:43No Priors Ep. 121 | With Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier
Opinion
Meier: Previous AI bio startups had overly tight lab integration
“Almost every AI bio company before us has had some kind of very tight lab integration with what they are doing. And it almost too tight.”
Joshua MeierJul 3, 2025▶ 3:05No Priors Ep. 121 | With Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier
AssertionSupported
Meier: Chai-2 achieved a 50% success rate on tested targets
“The model is not perfect. You know, it worked in 50% of the targets that we tried. Maybe it would have been more, right, for the caveats we talked about before, but, you know, it worked in 50% of cases.”
Joshua MeierJul 3, 2025▶ 18:50No Priors Ep. 121 | With Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier
Disclosure
Chai filtered benchmark targets to under 70% identity from training data
“So we actually wrote a scraper that would go and see what was in stock. We would go and pick out the protein. We would go look at what that protein sequence was. Now we need to make sure this is held out from training as well. Right? So we would take that, tha…”
Joshua MeierJul 3, 2025▶ 11:39No Priors Ep. 121 | With Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier
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