Computational biology

Oct 10, 2026

Why AlphaFold Didn't Solve Protein Folding — Pushmeet Kohli, Google DeepMind & Sal Candido, Biohub

A panel with Google DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli and Biohub's Sal Candido, moderated by Brandon Anderson, examines how AI should be built for biology. Topics include scaling laws and data quality, the bitter lesson applied to data, AlphaFold's handcrafted design and its limits, protein dynamics, cryo-EM as a richer data source, trust and calibration versus interpretability, and why curing disease requires 10x breakthroughs.

Sep 23, 2026

🔬Bio-security is an AI Arms Race - Eric Nguyen (CEO, Radical Numerics)

Eric Nguyen, CEO of Radical Numerics, details the journey from early genome language models to Omni, a system that excels in DNA reading, writing, and reasoning. Omni outperforms specialized models in disease-variant prediction, particularly in previously challenging non-coding regions. The discussion also covers the critical need for AI-native biosecurity defenses, addressing how models can design biological sequences that evade current detection systems, and the broader vision for General Biological Intelligence.

Aug 19, 2026

PhylaFlow: Hybrid flow matching in phylogenetic tree space

PhylaFlow is a hybrid flow-matching framework that navigates Billera–Holmes–Vogtmann (BHV) tree space to accelerate Bayesian phylogenetic inference. By learning geodesic paths from random trees to posterior samples, PhylaFlow efficiently initializes MCMC chains, drastically reducing the "burn-in" time. A PhylaFlow-MCMC variant, which guides MrBayes move acceptance, significantly outperforms traditional methods and even existing machine learning baselines for posterior sampling, achieving better results within the same computational budget. The work also explores conditioning on sequence embeddings, aiming for a future phylogenetics foundation model capable of zero-shot inference.

Aug 04, 2026

Chai Discovery's Bitter Lesson: Drug Design Is Another Scaling Problem

Chai Discovery is revolutionizing drug discovery by treating biology as an engineering problem, leveraging AI—particularly diffusion models and the "bitter lesson" of scaling—to design molecules rather than merely discover them. Their approach has boosted antibody design hit rates from 0.1% to 16%, aiming for a "Molecular CAD" suite that collapses discovery timelines from months to days. They partner with pharma, building infrastructure and creating a data flywheel to develop higher-quality, more targeted medicines for previously undruggable diseases.

Jul 21, 2026

Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)

Bo Wang and Ci Chu of Xaira Therapeutics introduce X-Cell, a 4.9-billion-parameter diffusion language model designed to predict cellular responses to genetic perturbations. Trained on PISCES, the largest genome-wide CRISPRi Perturb-seq dataset (25.6 million single cells across 16 contexts), X-Cell overcomes limitations of previous observational models. The discussion highlights the critical role of high-quality, causal data, X-Cell's architecture advantages, and its demonstrated ability to generalize to unseen cell types and primary cells, marking a significant step towards truly predictive virtual cell models in drug discovery.

Apr 16, 2026

Episode 16: Building AI for Life Sciences

OpenAI research lead Joy Jiao and product lead Yunyun Wang detail the development of specialized AI models for the life sciences. They discuss the new biochemistry-focused model series designed to accelerate research in genomics and protein understanding, the critical challenge of managing biosecurity risks through a "differentiated access" model, and the future vision of AI-powered autonomous labs that could revolutionize drug discovery and personalized medicine.