Contrary Research Rundown #88
The computational biology revolution, plus new memos on Ramp, Kraken, and more
Research Rundown
For the last few years now, people have been captivated by the potential for AI to disrupt everything (most recently? Social drinking, I guess.) But one of the most fascinating questions is how AI could revolutionize our understanding of biology and accelerate progress in fields like medicine and drug discovery.
AI models like AlphaFold and Evo are tackling complex biological problems that have stumped researchers for decades, such as predicting protein structures and generating DNA sequences. AI's ability to identify patterns in vast amounts of biological data could provide answers to longstanding questions without the need for a complete mechanistic understanding of the underlying processes.
Anna-Sofia Lesiv, who writes our essay series, Foundations & Frontiers, explained it this way:
"Increasingly, computational tools are showing us that a fully mechanistic understanding of biology might not be necessary to get the answers we seek. Since the early days of AlphaFold, models have moved beyond just protein folding.
In early 2024, substantial inroads were made toward this goal with the release of Evo, a model developed by the Arc Institute, Stanford, and TogetherAI. Evo is the first publicly available model that can make inferences over an entire genome. The model was trained on a data set of 2.7 million prokaryotic and phage genomes and is capable of generating DNA sequences at single-nucleotide precision.”
The emergence of AI models like Evo, capable of making inferences and predictions over entire genomes, represent a promising new chapter in biology and medicine. These models may soon become capable of answering our most puzzling biological questions, without the need for painstaking observation and experimentation.
Ramp is a fintech company that provides a suite of products designed to automate companies’ finance operations. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Software Engineer | Backend - Remote, U.S.
Software Engineer | Frontend - Remote, U.S.
Kraken is a global cryptocurrency exchange for retail and professional investors looking to buy, sell, and use blockchain assets. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Software Engineer - Java - Systems - CF Benchmark - United States, Canada Remote
Software Engineer - Asset Listings - United States Remote
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Kojo | U.S. Remote - Account Executive, Sales Development Representative, Software Engineer
Reality Defender | U.S. Remote - Senior Backend Infrastructure Engineer, Applied AI Engineer - (Audio), Data Engineering - Dataset Generation,
A piece in The Atlantic argues that news organizations are making a huge mistake by rushing to make deals with AI companies like OpenAI, which have been using their content without permission to train AI models - these deals amount to "settling without litigation" and are trading away their credibility for short-term cash.
Despite having four venture-backed IPOs in the first half of 2024, many investors don’t expect for the IPO market to fully reopen until 2025. However, the 2025 IPO roster is quite strong including potential companies like Klarna, Shein, Plaid, Figma, Stripe, Databricks and Canva.
Laura Deming, founder and partner of the Longevity Fund, emphasizes the importance of agency and choice over health and lifespan, rather than just accepting age-related decline as inevitable. “The question I care about is: What do I want to do? Like, when I'm 80, how strong do I want to be? OK, and then if I want to be that strong, how well do my muscles have to work? OK, and then if that's true, what would they have to look like at the cellular level for that to be true? Then what do we have to do to make that happen? In my head, it's much more about agency and what choice do I have over my health. And even if I live the same number of years, can I live as an 80-year-old running every day happily with my grandkids?”
Databricks announced the general availability of Mosaic AI Vector Search. It allows Databricks customers to enhance their generative AI applications by providing more accurate and contextual responses through efficient search over their unstructured data.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, discussed the upcoming paradigm shift in web development and user interfaces (UI), driven by advancements in AI and generative models. He thinks the future web will be dynamically generated and personalized, with AI agents creating tailored user interfaces on-the-fly, much like how mobile interfaces disrupted the traditional desktop paradigm.
Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, raised a $6 billion Series B round from investors including Valor Equity Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and others, valuing the company at $24 billion post-money to fuel its ambitious plans to compete with AI giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Alphabet.
Nubank reported that for ~35% of its users, purchasing USDC (a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar) was their first crypto transaction.
Scale AI is launching SEAL Leaderboards - private, expert evaluations of leading AI models, with the goal of providing trusted, non-overfitting assessments. “Evals are incentives for researchers, and our evaluations set the goals for how we aim to improve our models. Trusted 3rd party evals are a missing part of the whole ecosystem, which is why Scale AI built these.”
Perplexity is in talks to raise $250 million at a $3 billion valuation led by Bessemer. The new valuation would triple the company’s valuation from earlier this year. The company recently crossed $20 million in ARR.
After nine years and 200 million monthly active users, Discord has decided to ‘narrow’ it’s focus. “We've recognized the need to narrow our focus from broadly being a community-centric chat app to being a place that helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests.”
Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member, explained in an interview why the board fired CEO Sam Altman last November. She reported the board's decision to fire Altman was not due to concerns about product safety, development pace, finances, or communications but rather due to allegations of psychological abuse from Altman towards OpenAI executives.
OpenAI is rebooting its robotics team. The new team has been around for ~2 months and is currently hiring research engineers. “After disbanding its efforts to build a general purpose robot in 2020, the AI juggernaut is embarking on a new attempt to supply models to other companies aiming to build robots of their own.”
OpenAI's first report reveals foreign actors in countries like Russia and China are attempting to use AI for spreading propaganda campaigns, but are doing so ineffectively so far.
PayPal announced this week that it has hired the former head of Uber’s advertising unit to lead a new PayPal Ads division. In January, Paypal introduced “Advanced Offers, its first ad product…but PayPal now aims to sell ads not only to its own customers, but to so-called non-endemic advertisers, or those that don’t sell products or services through PayPal.”
Anduril’s Founder and CTO, Palmer Luckey, thinks the US should massively expand the use of nuclear power to provide abundant, cheap energy that would revitalize energy-intensive manufacturing industries like steel, aluminum, and cement, making them more globally competitive against countries like China and Russia.
Google's head of search admitted that the company's new AI-powered search feature, Google Overviews, had generated "bizarre and misleading answers" that went viral on social media, highlighting areas that needed improvement.
Arsalan Tavakoli, Co-founder and Senior VP of Field Engineering at Databricks, talked about the company's business strategy and the next Al frontier. “We were always the data + AI company, but we had to scream the data part and whisper AI part because it was considered too futuristic; now everyone is screaming AI, and we have to remind them not to forget about the data.”
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