00:00:57 · Sachin, Josh Meier, Adam Miller
[00:00:57] S1: What is the case in which this doesn't work? [00:00:59] S0: Even if we just shut down all the work in the company, the models that we have already achieved will probably have a massive impact in FOMO, but then realize that there's still tremendous progress, from here, that's possibly to be made. And it's getting very close to this vision we have as a company of someday creating a a zero shot drug candidate, like a molecule that's ready to go into patients that comes out zero shot from the model and requires no changes. And that feature doesn't look very far anymore. [00:01:25] S1: When can we expect AI, produced or designed drugs to be on the market? [00:01:30] S0: I mean, the crazy thing is... [00:01:36] S2: It's been an amazing day meeting your staff, your cofounders, and being able to see the model and the software in action. It's impressive. [00:01:45] S0: I agree. If you asked me a year ago, I I wouldn't have thought that that any of this was possible, to be honest, and that it would happen this quickly. [00:01:51] S2: Josh, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do at the company? [00:01:55] S0: Well, I'm Josh Meier. I'm one of the co founders here at Chai. [00:01:58] S2: And so what do you spend most of your time here doing at the company?
00:01:58 · Adam Miller, Josh Meier
[00:01:58] S2: And so what do you spend most of your time here doing at the company? [00:02:02] S0: I mean, really a bit of everything. Well, most of the team does everything here, to be honest, right? We're a small team that is handling massive data generation in the lab, lots of compute orchestration, we're building a product, we're building the best models in this space, we're working with some of the biggest customers in the world, biggest companies in the world. So there's a lot to do, and honestly, it's fun to just be able to work on so many different things. [00:02:27] S2: Yeah, I think there's a huge amount of excitement in us brimming for the launch, obviously of Chai three, because the results that everyone is talking about seem almost like not believable. [00:02:38] S0: Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. I think if you ask Paul on our team, asked him like, what's your favorite part about Chai? And he's like, the results. And I love that. I think we're, we're very, very mission driven, right? And a lot of that does come down to the results because if the models don't work well enough, then we can't make the best medicines possible. So that's why, you know, it all kind of comes back to how do we make the best technology? How do we make that technology accessible and work well for our customers? So it's a very exciting time to see us all come together.
00:02:38 · Josh Meier, Sachin, Adam Miller
[00:02:38] S0: Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. I think if you ask Paul on our team, asked him like, what's your favorite part about Chai? And he's like, the results. And I love that. I think we're, we're very, very mission driven, right? And a lot of that does come down to the results because if the models don't work well enough, then we can't make the best medicines possible. So that's why, you know, it all kind of comes back to how do we make the best technology? How do we make that technology accessible and work well for our customers? So it's a very exciting time to see us all come together. [00:03:07] S1: Maybe a funny place to start is we were chatting to Jack and he was telling me about how you guys met at Harvard and you're in the same classes. We asked him this question, so let's ask you, who's a better software engineer out of you two? [00:03:17] S0: I mean, Jack by far. I like so much for him like every day. [00:03:20] S2: Yeah, I love the humility. [00:03:23] S0: It's the truth. I would love [00:03:25] S2: to start sort of way back and just understand that when you were growing up, do you think you had signs in your upbringing, maybe in high school, that one day you'd be running a company like Chai of this size and trying to take on a mission like this?
00:03:25 · Adam Miller, Josh Meier
[00:03:25] S2: to start sort of way back and just understand that when you were growing up, do you think you had signs in your upbringing, maybe in high school, that one day you'd be running a company like Chai of this size and trying to take on a mission like this? [00:03:39] S0: I don't think I ever thought I would necessarily build a company. I'm not surprised when I ended up in this space growing up. I grew up as coder, right, as a young kid, but I come from a family of doctors, so I always wanted to do something in medicine, but I just loved programming, so I was like, programming seems like way more fun than just like, you know, showing up and treating patients every day, it seemed more repetitive to me, and of course it's not, and like doctors do amazing things, right, and they're so important for actually bringing these medicines to patients, but I always loved the scale that you got from programming, and that was what was so exciting about the process of making medicines, like one medicine, we're in the world of AI now, tokens, like the tokens that go into these medicines are so valuable, right? And they can be produced again and again and help so many people around the world. And I think if you have the skills to contribute to this in some way, it's almost like a moral obligation. Like this stuff is so important for humanity and society, and if you have the opportunity to work on it, you're in AI right now and you can literally turn like AI, you can turn GPUs into drugs, it's like a no brainer to work on something like that.
00:04:42 · Sachin, Josh Meier, Adam Miller
[00:04:42] S1: What's the biggest, like, motivator for you in terms of working on this mission? Like Josh told, sorry, we were told before that Alzheimer's is something that we think in the foreseeable future we could cure. Is an example like that of something that you'd love to just go after with the technology? [00:05:00] S0: I think for me, it's actually more broader scale. Like, it feels right to me that this is the way that most future medicines are going to be made. If you just think about it from first principles, if we are able to actually learn, in a sense, the laws of how atoms interact with one another, how pathways work, right, how medicines can interact with a cell and eventually with an organism. It just makes a lot of sense that that's how most future drugs would be made, and that's what I'm most excited about, just the broad scale that we get from that as opposed to any one disease. [00:05:31] S2: And you started out as one of your first jobs working for OpenAI, so how did you go from training models to training molecules to what you're doing now?:
00:05:31 · Adam Miller, Josh Meier
[00:05:31] S2: And you started out as one of your first jobs working for OpenAI, so how did you go from training models to training molecules to what you're doing now?: [00:05:39] S0: Yeah, so I studied chemistry actually in school, and I was a programmer since I was a kid. I did a lot of computer science in college too, But, so at OpenAI, we were training some of the early language models, right, GPT-one, GPT-two was happening then, and it occurred to me that if language models worked for natural language, French and German and English, why wouldn't they work for the real natural language, like DNA and proteins? And that's really how I got into it. I kind of just got obsessed with that idea at that point. Even back then, you know, like the business model around AGI was not very clear, right? It's like you had these, very mediocre chatbots and you had to take a ton of generations from the models to get them to do something interesting. But in biology actually, if you could take a 100 generations and like just, well, just one of them was good, that's actually incredible. People are used to screening millions or billions of molecules just to find like an initial starting point where you go make it better. So it felt to me actually that like the ingredients in AI were actually set up perfectly to have some impact in biology.