YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Dent

lines on the record: 32
first: 2025-07-03
most recent: 2025-07-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Really hiring across all functions right now. So we've made some really big breakthroughs here on the AI research side. And as we take that to the next level and try to get shy too in front of the right partners, we're hiring for product engineering, for antibody engineering, for business development, account executive. There's a whole host of roles that are open on our site right now. And again, this work is extremely interdisciplinary. And we really want it to build this in a thoughtful way so that we can make, you know, Chai Chu as useful as possible for the industry.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Means we have a high bar for like where we're spending our time. Everyone in the team works extremely hard. There's people in the office like, you know, all times of day, all times of night. And it's pretty beautiful to see that. So we work hard, but I think we also work really smart. And I think you have to do that to make progress with how fast the field is moving right now.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we tried to set up the company in a pretty scrappy way. Actually, when we were getting started, we should have even talked about this as well. The company wasn't, we were based in San Francisco. It wasn't even clear the company would be in San Francisco when we started. And, you know, back then, we hadn't like raised capital for the company really yet. We were kind of like using free compute credits from the cloud providers. I think for us, it's just about being, again, laser focused on solving the problem and just like really making the case like why are we doing something? And I think that, you know, if that's reasonable, we'll go and invest in it again in an engineering problem if it's kind of clear. You're seeing signs of life. You're seeing some scaling law, whatever it is, like let's go as fast as possible, make that work. Let's also not get distracted like scaling something out if we are not convinced that it's going to work yet. So I think that, you know, kind of scrappy culture on the, you know, where are we spending side kind of goes hand in hand with making really fast progress?”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're shipping internally are actually making their way into partners' hands. That's something that, again, we are very thoughtful about at Chai and take very seriously.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've also benefited from such immense focus as well. Everyone has been so passionate about trying to solve this problem. And I think I really credit that to being a huge reason on like why we were able to achieve it. And we've also got a team that, because of that focus, is very engineering centric as well. So if you look at the whole team, we have a very research-oriented team right now, but everyone is a stellar engineer as well and takes that very seriously. So it's not everyone's solving their favorite pet problem. We are all going and after the same problem and solving that together. And, you know, even just 10 people solving a problem together. There's a lot of code being written every day. You have to be very thoughtful about how that all comes together and interacts. And I think especially in our next phase of growth for the company as we start to invest more and more in product and the velocity around that and getting this into folks' hands, that's just going to become even more important. How do we make sure that the latest research breakthroughs that”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Until you start playing with the models. Even our team internally, you know, now, even without sending us to the lab, we can, again, choose some targets, choose some prompt, generate stuff against it. You start to look at the generations that are coming out of the model and you're like, oh, wait, I can actually solve this problem by like choosing the right epitope on a target, choosing the right part of the target. Like these two targets are different. These are the sorts of realizations that, in retrospect, are quite obvious, but they don't really hit you until you actually start to use a product like this yourself. So I think people are just once they get their hands on this. I think they will start to dream of the new possibilities.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, number one, get access to Chi2. Number two, you know, figure out how to get your prompts right and actually take full advantage of it. And then I think number three, start dreaming about the new possibilities. You know, it's interesting. We've talked to a lot of antibody engineers since starting the company. And women alluding sometimes to, you know, what we're doing here. Sometimes you do the market research question. You ask, you know, suppose you had like a 1% success rate as on any antibodies. Like, what would you use that for? The conversations are changing now that, first of all, it's not 1%, it's 10%. And like people see that as working. I think that creativity is really being unlocked, even ourselves, right? I think when people are thinking about the answer to that question, there's always some big doubt in your mind. It's like, it's a hypothetical question. You know, your neurons are not activating in the same way of doing something with it. It was the same thing with LLNs. It's like imagine asking someone five, 10 years ago, oh, you know, if we could predict the next ordinary sentence perfectly, like, what would you do with that? It's actually very hard to imagine.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing those experiments in the lab. We want the models to learn from that and then help us really be like a co pilot in driving like the next stage of those designs as well. You know, all of this is, again, it's more than just the models. It's really thinking about those workflows as well. And it's even about just getting that word out to people and having them think about this is a new tool in their stack. What happens if you're an antibody engineer and you've been doing things in a certain way for the past 30 years? And now there's a new paradigm in discovering drugs. That itself is actually a problem that a company needs to solve. So these are all different areas that we're investing in right now.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the same time. Sometimes, you know, actually, it's a good time to be a sick mouse in order to have a human drug. It usually needs to work in animals as well. And sometimes drug programs actually get stuck there. It's like, okay, guys, like we either have a mousetroke or a human drug, it's really hard to get both. And there are actually some cases where people have to discover two different drugs. They have, they call a surrogate antibody. I'm going to like make the mouse version. I'm going to study that, convince the FDA that like this mechanism works. But you're even taking risk. You're like, maybe this molecule works slightly differently. We literally show that example in the paper of optimizing, we don't do mouse, we actually do monkey. So like monkey and human together. But you can throw other species into that as well. Sometimes we've got the opposite problem. I want to hit this protein. I don't want to hit this other protein. We've got some early evidence as of late that's possible as well. And these sorts of things, you know, the prompts are just a lot more complicated. And it means that you need to have like the right product. What happens when you start?”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing to add on to that as well, we released Chai One open source. We thought of it as a model. And I think Chai 2 is a lot more than a model, right? It's become a product. It's actually more of a bigger pipeline that comes together to even make this happen. And it also becomes trickier to use these models. Protein folding, you put in your sequences, you get in a structure. Design is a different story, right? Actually, specifying the prompt on its own. We did that programmatically in the paper to go and assess this thing at scale. But a scientist who wants to use this to initiate a drug discovery program, probably not using a script to come up with that prompt is probably going to be really thoughtful about it. And I think that's why investing in the product layer here is really important. And not to mention, it's only going to get more complicated from here, right? As we start to support more advanced drug modalities, as there's various properties that come online, as the we actually show some early evidence of this in the white paper, you might want to actually optimize for multiple proteins.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the hope, yeah. And I think we've got a lot of reason to be optimistic. I also don't want to oversimplify things. You know, there's lots of other things that go into making a drug. There's capital markets that go into this. There's tons of clinical risk. This is really just the tip of the iceberg, but we're really excited about the progress that this could represent.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is really exciting. So, there's still a lot more work to do for us to validate that, like, all this is going to be possible. But I think just the pace at which the field is moving just gives us a lot of optimism for what's going to be possible next.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Proteins that are hitting them basically two different primitive antibodies. And let me bring them together. This is called a biparatopic two paratopes. So basically two different antibody interactions. And that kind of stuff is going to become a lot easier to do today. I think these days there's a lot of trade-offs that get made in biotech about like, you know, risk on your target, risk on your discovery process. How hard is it going to be to make our molecule? And I think AI is going to raise the bar across the board. I think the bullish on biotech movement that Jack is announcing here as well. If we think about what that could even represent, there's right now a lot of risk in biotech. There's a lot of crowding on the same kinds of targets. The risk actually starts to go down in terms of discovering some of this stuff. Maybe there's still clinical risk if you try something that's like totally new that people haven't done before, but we've just like opened up, I think, the arbitrage of opportunities that can be pursued here. And that's something that I think is.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually a lot more than just success rates. There's lots of properties that need to be optimized for a molecule. You know, finding a drug is like looking for a needle in the haystack. And I think we've really passed through massive swaths of that sequence space with Chi2, right, by really focusing on the things that buy. And that's where a lot of the search space has to be searched in the lab today, going deeper into other properties as well. Let's make sure that these antibodies can be manufactured well. Let's make sure that they can be really stable. So there's lots of other properties that we're excited about. So stay tuned for that. And another thing is actually there are next generation antibody formats even. So what we predict will happen is people probably won't be as interested in the clinic for things like monoclonal antibodies. These are antibodies that are hitting, for example, like a specific epitope on a protein. But now if we can make antibodies much faster and more easily, you can imagine a future where if I want to hit a target, let me choose two different parts of that target, make two different.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we'll find ways to actually take the best of AI and marry that with the best of biology to kind of push the bounds forward.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think if you just take the models and then you sample more, you probably will get a better result. So we tested only 20 molecules per targeting the paper up to 20 molecules. You know, if you were to do 10 times that, 100 times that, orders of magnitude more, you probably just get into spaces with better molecules. So, you know, the machine learning model is probabilistic. It's like using chat GPT if you're trying to solve a math problem and then you look at the top one response or if you look at the top 10,000 responses, you're going to get a better result if you look at the top 10,000. You can't really do that with a product experience on ChatGPT. I'm not going to look through 10,000 math responses. I won't even know which one is correct. The cool thing with a lab, actually, is we actually could just test all 10,000 of those in the lab. So I don't know if you have to, but that's definitely something that is, I think, going to be tested out with these models. And I think the future of high throughput screening and how they kind of interact with the models, I think the question is still open. But I expect that people will be...”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are really excited, right? Like, we're getting artificial antibodies before we're getting maybe other breakthroughs we would have expected earlier. But it's overall been really exciting to see that reception. I mean, our inboxes are just flooding up. Like the early access has gone in hundreds of people, you know, within hours of launching, reaching out to us. We just announced. So I think we're still kind of digesting all that. We're a small team. So we're prioritizing early access to the right people, but we're really excited to kind of get the models out there and for them to start solving some really hard problems in the drug discovery space.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question. You know, usually when these kinds of papers come out, again, people have tried to do this many times. The critique is often, you know, does this really work? You showed this on maybe COVID, for example. Is this going to work for a case where we have less training data? Are the molecules going to be high quality? Do we really, you know, kind of believe the data? So I think the approach we did, like benchmarking this at scale, has really helped a lot with that reception. Like, I think people really appreciated that approach, which has been great. Some of the questions people have is, okay, like I can already discover drugs. uh you know so now i have ai that can do it a lot faster but does that actually change the kinds of molecules i can work on and it goes back to what we just discussed before i think there are other folks that are responding to that saying like no like the the transformation here is how about those projects that didn't work for you uh or where you're really struggling today now you've got another tool in the toolkit and you kind of have to use this tool now or you might be left behind so i think that it's been really interesting to see the the community kind of digesting this of course a lot of the ai folks”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them a lot faster, some a lot cheaper. But I think really the breakthrough opportunities are things that just weren't possible before.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great question, Sarah. So, there's maybe two main areas that we can break it down into. The first one is, again, like we've returned this into an engineering problem and Spin is spending months or sometimes even years trying to discover some molecule. Now we can actually do it way faster because the screening, if you will, is happening on the computer instead of in the lab. But the second area that we're actually even more excited about is how do we actually solve problems which just weren't even reachable with traditional methods. 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. The failure mode of the models is going to be different than the failure mode in the lab today. And I think that's really going to be the sweet spot to focus in on. What are the areas that were not possible, you know, a few months ago where now we'll be able to actually generate potential molecules really quickly against. So those are the two areas, things that you can do today.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even have a thought in our paper in the supplement where we actually look at an even harder subset, so not looking at things that are up to 70% sequence similarity with the model, but actually pushing all the way down to 25%. So really looking at tasks that are very different we saw in training. success rate was basically the same like the model didn't care and again i think that indicates something very profound about what the models are learning here”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think it just tells you something about maybe the signature of how proteins interact with one another is really embedded in the data, right? And we're generalizing to a new setting. So it's not like the model has seen specific binders against the target and then we're just trying to do some in domain generalization and walk through that space. That's actually quite an impactful application as well. And that's already being done through the biotech industry. Our team published work on that years ago already. But I think this really new frontier about generalizing to new space, it tells us that again, like the model is learning something really fundamental about how the molecules interact with one another. Again, it's able to generalize to problems that look very different in terms of how we would actually organize it in the biology. I think the whole rules about, you know, what do we think about like a protein family being different? These targets that we tested on are, again, a biologist, they are very quote unquote dissimilar from what we saw during training. But it doesn't seem like the model thinks that way.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think this whole point about the atomic level microscope is actually that point, right? There is something really, I don't know, I think deep, we still don't fully understand it about like why these models work. Again, we didn't even know this was possible. Obviously, we tried it, so we thought that there was a chance.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Location, and then model will go in and generate both a sequence and a structure that kind of fits into that. So that's like the high level intuition for this”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Structure prediction is really a key part in making these models work. And it's actually the first thing we did when we started the company is we sprinted to build a state of the art structure prediction engine. We actually opened sourced the first version of that. It's called Chai Wan. And again, like scientists around the world are using that now. But structure prediction basically gives you an atomic level microscope and it allows you to see where atoms are placed in 3D space. So once you can do that and you have this microscope then the next question is well can we start moving those atoms around right we can now start to make changes in a sequence and then we can see the ramifications of those changes in 3d space so the actual design model you can think of it as you prompt it with some information like here's a target that we want to go and design in anybody against and then the model will will try to place again these atoms in 3d space in order to satisfy that constraint like we tell the model here's the target and i want you to make a molecule that you know binds to that”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now we've got like hundreds of people that want to go and try the model tomorrow and apply it to the very struggle programs that they're working on. So that was really how we came up with those 50 tasks. Let's benchmark this and treat as an engineering problem.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now we need to make sure this is held out from training as well, right? So we would take that protein sequence, we would go compare it to all of like the database called the SADAB. It's a group of like antibody structures in the protein data bank and we'd make sure that like none of these sequences were in there and that none of these sequences were actually even close to anything in there. We removed things that had more than 70% sequence identity. So really things that are like a bit different than what we could have trained on. Then selected those, made our designs, and then we shipped everything off to the lab. We actually think it's possible that the 50% is actually an underbound because we might have just like messed things up because of how we set up this experiment. We did not think about the biology. These are not necessarily things that are even that useful for therapeutics. Some of these are already even have drug programs against them. We were just doing this really from a model assessment perspective. Let's understand how well the model is working. Let's convince ourselves. Let's convince the community that Chi2 is working. And then in terms of applying this to problems, I think”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Engineering people would love it. We actually just went to the vendor catalogs to see what was in stock because we wanted to turn around this experiment quickly. We wanted all of these designs at the same time. 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.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question, Sarah. So, in the Chai Too paper, we look at over 50 targets. Most of the existing papers in this area of doing AI for drug discovery are usually looking at like one, two, or three targets. But again, it was important for us, if we were seen as an engineering problem to make sure that this was going to be generalizable. It's like imagine you had a new LLM paper and you said, oh, I solved like one problem in the USMO contest, like really, really cool. It's like, yeah, you need a real benchmark and you need to actually have that benchmark at scale. You need to have enough problems to convince yourself that the system is working. So that's why whenever we do these experiments, you know, sometimes we'll try one or two targets just to make sure there's not like a huge bug and, you know, make sure not everything fails. But, you know, even if everything fails in one or two, you know, the hit rates 50%. You could have just gone unlucky. So that's one of the reasons why we decided to do a big benchmark here, really convince ourselves things are working. The way we selected the 50 problems, the biology people would laugh at this.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discovering protein folding as well. So that's a bit of color on how we decided to start the company and when we did. And maybe lastly, I should say 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. I think the lab integration is great. We do a lot of lab experiments at Chai. But the thing that was missing was could you actually have some kind of portable AI platform, something that would actually be generalizable and could be applied to lots of different areas? If you could do that, it means that your impact could really be taken to the next level. We can take Chai2, the model that we've just released, and we can deploy it to hundreds of different projects, thousands of different projects. Chai 1, which we open source, is already being applied throughout the industry to tons of different products. We don't even know everything that's being applied to because it's open sourced. But that was something that was also really important to us if we were going to kind of see this transformation of biology from a science into more of an engineering discipline, which is a”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Protein sequence, and we can see what that protein looks like, it's very useful for basic biology so we can understand what the proteins we're looking at look like. But if you think about drug discovery, which is where we're really focused on at Chi Discovery, in drug discovery, you need to understand how multiple molecules interact with one another. So you need to understand how a small molecule drug is going to modulate a protein or how an antibody protein is going to modulate it in an antigen protein. So we started to see early signs of life that that was going to be possible. And again, we made a bet that we would be able to take this to the next level with the kinds of breakthroughs that we were seeing around diffusion models and around language models. The previous generation of structure prediction models would really just predict one confirmation protein at a time. It kind of like one view on a protein. It's like the early image models. Like they didn't have diffusion models. You weren't really able to look at the diversity of generations that could come out. And we thought the same thing would impact drug.”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. So many of us have been working on this space for a while and didn't start a company because it was really a research idea, I think, until very recently. You know, there were signs of life that Sunday this was going to work, but it wasn't really on the timeline of a company, right? You can't really start a company thinking that 10 years from now things are going to work. You also don't want to start a company after it's already working and kind of miss the boat. So the sweet spot is like, okay, we have like maybe one, two years that we have to really get this off the ground. And we made a bet when we started a company that was going to work. There were really a couple of things that fueled that decision. The first one was we made a bet that structure prediction, protein folding was going to get a lot better. So obviously protein folding is considered solved in a couple of years ago around like 2020. You had the breakthroughs of alpha fold 2 and being able to predict protein structures with experimental accuracy. But it was just a single protein structure at a time. So we can take a single...”
2025-07-03 · No Priors · Chai-2: The AI Model Accelerating Drug Discovery with Chai Discovery Co-Founders Jack Dent and Joshua Meier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT