00:22:01 · Sachin, Josh Meier
[00:22:01] S1: does that actually mean for the world if that happens? And everyday person, they may be watching this that has a parent or loved one that's maybe sick, what actually does mean? [00:22:11] S0: I think it means that we can, first of all, look at many more projects in parallel, right? If we can now take big teams that usually would work on one project for many years at a time, and we can instead just put them on trying many, many different ideas in parallel and then get molecules that are, you know, very close to moving forward, you can imagine, you know, years of progress being made in a much shorter period of time, and then I think the second order effects of that on the industry are actually the most interesting ones. If you start to solve this problem of drug design, then there's a question of like, well, what should I drug in the first place? What's the target I should go after? If I can make the drugs very quickly, just try lots of different targets, right? And then similarly, now I have like this clinical trial bottleneck, right? I need to go put these things through trials. Well, if you make a better medicine, it should be easier to run your trial. The effect size will actually be bigger when you actually look at that molecule. So I think a lot of it comes down to focusing, very deeply onto this problem, solving it as well as we can, and then actually getting it out there into the world, and making sure that, this is the way that pharma actually designs their drugs.
00:23:13 · Adam Miller
[00:23:13] S2: On the point of actually getting out there into the world, what are those sort of roadblocks happening? Because with this model and subsequent models, drug discovery we're going to be discovering a huge amount of them. When does it get to the point where people with all these sort of illnesses that we haven't solved before that we can actually start to make these, zero shot, drug designs that are actually in the hands of people?
00:23:35 · Josh Meier
[00:23:35] S0: So the first step is actually getting into the tools of the drug hunters who are making the molecules themselves. So at Chai, we do a ton of work not just on the model development, but also on the product and being able to ship these models, to the world. It's one thing to just throw a model over the wall and hope that people can figure it out. It's another to build a really intuitive product experience that allows people to, like, iteratively work on these projects on the computer. In a computer aided design suite, it's, for, for molecules, it's, I know it's zero shot, right, for generating the molecules, but you need be very thoughtful about what am I zero shotting, how do I actually collect all those inputs, how do I look at the results and decide what to do next, So we put a lot of care into thinking through what does that product look like, and I think it's a really key part of the company and what we're doing here. So that's the first step, how do we actually get this into people's hands so we can use it on the right projects? And then the next is, how do organizations, actually test these models, start to trust them, and then use it for all these projects and change the way that they're working? Because if we can get these tools into people's hands, the processes around them need to change. We need to change how we discover targets. We need to change then how we manufacture all these materials that are coming out. So it actually requires a lot of thinking by these companies, and that's why we're actually investing in those kinds of deep relationships at the very senior level, with our customers to help them think through how to even adopt this AI transformation. And I think that's also one of the most exciting parts of my job, honestly, is like getting to meet these folks who are dedicating their lives to creating these medicines and then helping them get access to this technology that can allow them to do their job at just the next level.
00:25:06 · Sachin
[00:25:06] S1: How do you think about how Chai continues to scale its impact on more of a commercial level? Like, obviously, you guys have now raised a lot of money and you've needed it to fund compute and a lot of these kind of results you've seen, but how do you kind of go from more of a research organization to a commercial organization, which I'm sure you've seen Sam and the OpenAI team do?
00:25:24 · Josh Meier
[00:25:24] S0: For a while, we were really an R and D company, right? We were investing in creating, the best models possible, and we actually didn't commercialize, we open sourced what we were doing, in part because we didn't think it was valuable enough for people to pay for it, and then we tried to cross that inflection point where the models became useful for pharma, right? And at that point, we really started to become more of a commercial organization. We started investing in the product, the business development in order to make that happen. So when we think about ourselves as an enterprise organization or actually a commercial organization, it's all about how do we get this into the most impactful projects possible in the industry. So it's actually quite natural, and one of the things I love about our business model is, as our technology gets better, we unlock more projects, we create more value, which means people want to buy more Chai for their projects, and as our product becomes better, as our technology becomes better, as our validation becomes better, the business just does better as a result too, and that allows us to continue reinvesting in this. And you see a similar thing with the big AI labs, right, like OpenAI, when they come out with better models, people buy more tokens, and that gives you the money you need to then go and build the next generation of the models. And it's it's very exciting to work in a company that has that flywheel because it means that, as we get better on everything we're doing here, it really does translate into more commercial success, and ultimately that's what the company needs to do.
00:26:42 · Sachin, Josh Meier, Adam Miller
[00:26:42] S1: Because it's such a technical area, have you thought about the business model of, like, doing the work for the pharma companies versus giving them the tools to do the work? [00:26:51] S0: It comes down to how to create the most impact possible. And our customers are quite good at what they do. They know the biology really well, they know the targets really well, and in order to create the most impact, we wanna create the best product experience so that these models can actually be leveraged, for for those projects. So it's not even an either or, to be honest. Yeah. It's not do we help them with their project or do we build the tools for it? It just starts from like, how do you solve the projects in the most effective way possible? And then you end up, you know, kind of pushing on both levers. [00:27:21] S2: Commercially, one of your big partnerships is with Eli Lilly, and from what I understood a little bit today is that you will sort of discover these drugs and they help try and develop them. Can you talk a little bit more about what that partnership looks like and what the feedback loops also look like when working with them?