@MichaelRetchin
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Building scientific intelligence. past: founding team @cellaritybio, ML researcher @Cornell, investor @pillar_vc, advisor @nucleateHQ
Joined April 2011
- Tweets4.9K
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Michael Retchin retweeted
Looking forward to: “can an a computer scientist align an LLM”
The long awaited sequel to “can a biologist fix a radio”
cell.com/fulltext/S1535-6108…
Michael Retchin retweeted
We are approaching cyber-superintelligence.
But our systems aren't ready. We must secure our model weights and infrastructure against three new threats: sabotage, escape, and theft.
There is a way forward.
Secure Acceleration:
A Cyberdefense Strategy for Superintelligence
Michael Retchin retweeted
We're launching 30B-scale virtual screening at Rowan today in partnership with @onepot_ai.
By combining Rowan's high-throughput computational infrastructure with onepot's autonomous lab, we can go from target to experimental data in weeks, not months.
Michael Retchin retweeted
More capable models will introduce increased biological risk. The magnitude is fiercely debated, the direction is not.
We need more resilient biodefense.
Michael Retchin retweeted
Today, there's a strong focus on fast-follows of existing drugs. The drug programs that inspire me look different – the target is known, but we don't know how to build the drug, often requiring the dev of new tech that paves the path for more drugs.
Michael Retchin retweeted
.@newlimit is hosting a dinner in boston on sept 24 to connect with talented scientists & engineers
we promise an evening of surprising conversations, good food, & better company
let us know if you or a friend are interested in joining!
newlimit.notion.site/3cf10a8…
Michael Retchin retweeted
We're launching a program to get free or heavily discounted Claude usage to scientists, through Claude Teams for Science.
If you're a student or researcher in academia or a non profit org, ask your PI to apply. We're starting with 10,000 seats and will expand from there.
Starting today, 10,000 scientists across every field, from math to chemistry to physics and more, can get Claude through our new Claude Team plan for scientists. Standard seats are free, and premium seats with 5x usage limits are $15 per month, an 80% discount, for one year.
Claude is becoming increasingly capable of scientific work, with recent progress on problems from advanced physics calculations to protein design. Alongside that progress, we've been investing in the research community: Claude Science launched in June, and our AI for Science program funds high-impact projects with free credits. Today's expansion builds on both.
Principal investigators (or equivalent) at academic and nonprofit research institutions can sign up, then add the researchers in their group. Over the coming months, we plan to extend the program well beyond the initial 10,000 seats.
Learn more: claude.com/programs/team-pla…
Michael Retchin retweeted
The OpenAI Foundation (@FoundationOAI) is now hiring 20+ people (4 roles in the life-sciences team!)
If you are excited about our mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, I would love for you to apply or share this link with someone talented: openaifoundation.org/careers…
Michael Retchin retweeted
Thrilled to post thread re: new single-cell lineage of mouse embryo reconstructed w/ DNA Typewriter. One animal, zygote to late organogenesis (E13.5). Tree has 1,340,794 transcriptionally profiled, annotated tips (cells), 1,142,588 dated internal nodes, rooted at zygote
1/n
Michael Retchin retweeted
i never thought i would be this person but: please contact me if you’re interested in subletting my NYC 34th street x park avenue apartment from (August 22-September 30th)
roommates are a pleasant late 20s dude in finance and a cantankerous black foster cat
Michael Retchin retweeted
Today, we're opening a call for applications focused on rare genetic diseases. This program has a track for scientists doing basic research, and another for early-stage biotechs.
Accepted applicants will receive $50K in Claude credits over six months and join a community of researchers using AI to go after rare diseases.
We're accepting applications through August 2. – at Hoboken, NJ
We're offering grants of up to $50,000 in Claude usage credits to researchers accelerating cures for rare diseases.
This is our first focused call within AI for Science, our program supporting scientists using Claude to speed up discovery. anthropic.com/news/rare-dise…
Michael Retchin retweeted
Apply here for our Computational Research Scientist position and work with us @AnthropicAI on making fundamental biological discoveries: – at Manhattan, NY
Another job posting for a computational role in our research group focused on making fundamental discoveries in biology:
job-boards.greenhouse.io/ant…
Michael Retchin retweeted
Today, we’re launching @TuvaAI to build a human-centric future for agentic science.
Humans collaborating with AI can learn more than either working alone: humans guiding the research, equipped with agents that can test ideas quickly and autonomously, will deliver the next wave of scientific discovery. But science is all about the details. Neither Einstein nor AGI can drive your project forward without intimately understanding your growing, interrelated web of hypotheses, intermediate results, working threads, failed experiments, datasets, notes, and water cooler conversations.
Our first product, Rao, was born out of my frustration having to reteach LLMs these constantly changing details for every single task in my own research. Rao maintains a persistent, dynamic research memory that learns and remembers project context, history, and threads. This research memory then links into our scientific agents as well as other AI software you may already be using, such as Claude or Codex. With Rao, every scientist turns into a PI managing a proactive, agentic research team that automatically stays on the same page.
Rao is live in VS Code and by CLI, and can help with any scientific task that can be done in a computer. Our early users include computational biologists, theoretical neuroscientists, chip designers, and polymer physicists who use Rao daily to ideate, do math, analyze data, and write papers and grants.
Now, we’re excited to announce Rao in closed beta. If your science mostly happens in a computer—theory, computational modeling, experimental data analysis, scientific writing—Rao can help you discover more, faster. Sign up for our waitlist, and if you’re a fit, we’ll work with you to tailor new, contextual agents that augment the way you do science. Link in the comments.
More personally: I’ve been doing scientific research since I was a kid. Scientists do so much for the world, choosing a painstaking career for the joy of discovery, developing technologies we use every day along the way. And yet, the tools scientists use are often cumbersome and woefully out of date. For me, Tuva is much about empowering the people of science with products they love as it is about the discoveries we’ll help them make. And I’m lucky to work with some wonderful humans along the way—@SamsaraDurvasu1 @anuvellore @KimchiOfer among many others. If our mission resonates, please reach out.
Michael Retchin retweeted
The most valuable medicines on earth, biologics, are proteins that die unless they stay within 2–8°C. Yet they cross the ocean by cargo ship, where a refrigerated container can lose power and a chokepoint like the Strait of Hormuz can wreck the whole voyage.
@Alexkesin on the cold chain keeping drugs safe at sea in Arena 008: At Sea.
Michael Retchin retweeted
We built the lab that's able to go from AI-led drug design to data in 24h.
GPT-8 won't be bottlenecked by intelligence. It needs a biological compute layer.
This is Capable. We're turning AI capabilities into human capabilities--starting with short-sleeper peptides.
Michael Retchin retweeted
Adding another one to the collection...
Out now: a new piece analyzing the explosion of deal flow of China-US over the past few years, and whether it spells disaster for Western biotech.
A Reading Guide to Chinese Biotech
Some friends and I visited China to learn about its biotech ecosystem. Beforehand, we assembled a list of 51 "high signal" books, podcasts, and articles to help us prepare.
During the trip, we also asked people who *they* followed for their news on China, and then we added many of those names to this guide. Hopefully this will be a useful resource for folks who are planning to visit (which I recommend, especially if you work in drug development.)
Michael Retchin retweeted
I think biotechnology is the most exciting thing you can work on. But I have never written down my reasons for thinking this explicitly, so here are some bulleted arguments:
- It is incredibly broad across both space and time.
Biology spans every possible scale, from atoms to organisms to the planet. Biochemical reactions happen at nanosecond timescales, whereas organisms evolve over hours (in some cases) or millennia. This breadth means that there is always something new to discover. I believe it's possible for any undergraduate student, with a little bit of guidance, to make an original discovery in a matter of weeks. It may not be an important discovery, but you can quickly find things that nobody else has ever found before.
- Insights gained into one organism apply to many others.
It is a miracle that we can engineer living organisms at all. How peculiar that a bacterial defense system (CRISPR-Cas) can be adapted into a gene-editing tool which works not only in bacteria, but also in plants and algae and humans. All life shares a common ancestor, and is assembled from a common set of ingredients, so we can mix-and-match our tools to solve incredibly diverse problems. (If life formed multiple times, and each "tree" of life persisted to the present, then the tools made for one branch of that tree would be unlikely to work in another. Fortunately, this is not the case.)
- A deep understanding of biology can be applied to a *huge* range of problems.
Say you're a protein designer, using computers to design new types of molecules. Such a skill is not only useful for making medicines! It can also be used to make antivenoms, or to design peptides that protect plants against pests, or a million other things. This means that, as a biotechnologist, you can work on medicines or climate change or agriculture or making life multiplanetary ... all using a common set of skills.
It is just unfortunate that biology is taught in such a boring way in schools, with textbooks and rote memorization. My advice would be to fight through your boredom and then join a research laboratory, as soon as you possibly can. Get hands-on skills and try to work on your own problems.
Michael Retchin retweeted
we are hiring for a small number of high impact roles across research, engineering, and strategic ops at @tacitlabsco!
come do the best work of your life with the best people you'll ever work with. we work together, in person, out of a beautiful office in Dogpatch.
the culture here is high ownership and high-urgency. we keep the team intentionally small, meaning that each new person we bring on is n-of-1, with enormous scope and lots of room to run. we like people to be highly opinionated, technical, and a little bit weird.
you'll work closely with our partners at the frontier labs, giving you ample exposure to research at the bleeding edge. send us an email with a couple lines about you, what you've worked on, and why you want to join - queuing up our first wave of interviews for next week!
