Co-founder & CEO - Plasmidsaurus πŸ¦•πŸ¦–πŸ§¬ The only real DNA Sequencing as a Service company

South San Francisco, CA
Joined June 2009
Come build with us and accelerate the entirety of biotech. plasmidsaurus.com/careers
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Mark Budde πŸ¦•πŸ† retweeted
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
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Neurons directly encode feelings and concepts. Was this the problem with the previous opus claude speak? Was it maximizing token efficiency by activating these neurons directly, which is unreadable to us?
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works already-clean.goodfire.com/
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Tonight they are shutting down the old Burbank terminal - lucky to be one of the final passengers to land. We'll see how the new terminal stacks up on Wednesday. So long and thanks for the super fast security line. πŸ›¬
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As I use AI to interpret the significance of superhuman AI math results, I feel deeply, deeply strange. Feels like stepping into the singularity.
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All this renaming has me thinking Synthetic Biology could be more awesome. From now on we do
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Plasmidsaurus for everything / more and more things! I think this is a good near term solution
Replying to @baym @Burghoff
Though it makes me wonder if the real future model isn't research labs becoming autonomous but many of the protocols and steps becoming sold as services by companies with a semiautonomous production floor. DNA sequencing and synthesis are already heading that way
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This is where we were at with AI code early last year btw
Grok 3 is, uh, not great at coding
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A friend posted on Nextdoor with an absurdly specific list of what she wanted in a house. The comments were flooded with people mocking her for being unrealistic. One person DMed her. She got exactly the house she wanted, under market.
wrote out a list of who I’m looking for. X, work your magic. non negotiable - 35 to 42 y/o - healthy masculine - smart, funny, lighthearted - provider/protector mentality - post economic (still hardworking) - must be kind, generous, thoughtful - no kids yet, decidedly wants kids - on the healing path (history of serious commitment ex therapists, books, retreats) - can meet anywhere but will not date unless live in the same city - fit and sober because you care about your health strongly preferred - no prev marriages or engagements - works in tech (comfortable with risk and career is blended into personal life)
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πŸ€– Made with AI
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at ucsf
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Mark Budde πŸ¦•πŸ† retweeted
People say the Boston Marathon route is the most important route in the city, but to us? It’s the dropbox route. 😎 Watch our Plasmidsaurus dino cover the Boston sample pickup route and see if you recognize anyone! A special thank you to the customers featured: Eric Lander Lab, Jim Collins Lab, Stephen Blacklow Lab, Vijay Sankaran Lab, Ryan Flynn Lab, Sanofi, Deep Genomics, Ginkgo Bioworks, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Flagship Pioneering, Boston Children's Hospital, and CRISPR Therapeutics. Same-day results on Whole Plasmid, Amplicon, & ZeroPrep Colony Sequencing...and speed is just the start! - Built to handle the most complex samples - Service you can rely on - Intuitive interactive reports Trusted by all 50 top NIH-funded institutions, Addgene, every Ivy League, ~99% of NCI-designated cancer centers, and ~95% of US R1 universities. Send your samples via a dropbox today! No Dropbox, no problem β€” request one via plasmidsaurus.com/?utm_sourc… for Boston or beyond.
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Mark Budde πŸ¦•πŸ† retweeted
On behalf of the Intercept team, I’m excited to share that we’re launching our first β€œRequest for Candidates”! We’re looking for the best science (and teams!) in the world that could plausibly meet our target product concept. Our ultimate goal is to radically reduce the burden of respiratory viruses, and an easy-to-use, safe, and effective preventative is a critical part of that puzzle. This request for candidates will be open until at least December 31st, but proposals received by October 12 will be prioritized. interceptfund.com/apply/broa…
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So instead of HOMES we now have SHAME?
Google Maps this morning officially renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America inside the US. President Trump said last week to reporters that he may rename an ocean to the American Ocean next, but has to decide between the Atlantic and Pacific.
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Today I visited @NOETIK_ai headquarters in South SF, with @Ronalfa. Incredibly impressive. I haven't been this excited about a company in while - exactly how real bio AI companies should be operating. πŸ”₯
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Plasmidsaurus is the cutest company name I have ever heard
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Replying to @markwbudde
Thanks for AI pilling me again
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Am I the only one who doesn’t understand why we need data centers? I spent all morning searching Google and Wikipedia and couldn’t find a single good reason. Then I watched a 45-minute YouTube explainer in 4K, but it was mostly about AI, and I’m just waiting for that bubble to pop. I opened 200 browser tabs, downloaded a few hundred research papers, translated three from Chinese, and uploaded 2TB of sequencing data so colleagues in eight countries could analyze it with me. Then we discussed the results on Zoom while Slack transcribed the meeting and emailed everyone a summary. Around lunch, my phone backed up 14,000 family photos, synchronized my contacts and calendar across six devices, routed me around traffic, checked the weather using live satellite data, booked a doctor’s appointment, refilled a prescription, paid a bill, transferred money between banks, approved payroll for hundreds of employees, and ordered groceries. Later, I read about hospitals retrieving patient records and medical scans in seconds, emergency services coordinating disaster responses, scientists designing protein therapies and sharing enormous datasets, utilities balancing the electrical grid, and airlines continuously rerouting thousands of flights. But these all felt like pretty niche edge cases. So I asked an AI agent to turn everything I had done that day into a Twitter post, make it increasingly insane and obvious, and optimize it for maximum engagement.
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This is the best discussion on the state of AI in biotech. Sober, rational, grounded by two people who know it deeply, but don't have agenda. You should listen to it! open.substack.com/pub/ashlee…
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Mark Budde πŸ¦•πŸ† retweeted
Congratulations to the USA on their successful launch of a sea-worthy vessel unencumbered by the Jones Act.
After approx. 24 days at sea, the SpaceX Recovery team successfully guided Starship to a location just off the coast of Christmas Island. A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle in calmer waters before attempting to return it to Starbase
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Mark Budde πŸ¦•πŸ† retweeted
This is one of the most exciting things I've ever done in my life, on par with seeing my hardware run a solar car. Deploying your hardware to the desert is always an amazing test. The most striking thing is the ease of setup. Our test rig only has two external connections, the PV solar array and a couple of batteries powering the instrumentation. We can literally wheel a wagon over to any solar array (of suitale amperage), plug in, and immediately be producing Hydrogen. There is only one control system on the rig, a contactor. Either you're directly coupled to the array making hydrogen or your not. This bodes extremely well for building terawatts of electrolyzers and conquering the primary energy layer of civilization! We will win!
Last week the hydrogen electrolyzer team @terraformindies pulled off yet another first, the sustained production of >99.9% pure H2 from our vertically integrated, California-manufactured electrolyzer stack while it was coupled directly to a solar array at our Muroc desert test site. WTAF? Most commercial electrolyzers need carefully conditioned power from expensive battery-meditated backup systems. Ours runs directly off the sun. Clouds pass, the day turns to night, and we maintain purity from a stack whose Bill of Materials cost is well below $100/kW. Terraform's single-minded focus on capex reduction has allowed us to convert sunlight to hydrogen in an unprecedented demo at a cost below $2/kg. If that wasn't enough, we have a crystal clear plan of steady execution to push that cost below $1/kg in the coming years. Rather than linger on this point in response to experts-with-spreadsheets who said this was not only beyond my team, it was forbidden by known laws of physics, let me tell you a bit about how we actually pulled this off. We started building this test site in March. Once the panels and electrics were in place the CO2 team were the first to demonstrate production on site. Close behind them the electrolyzer team planned the logistics necessary to project substantial operational ability into a hostile test site in the middle of nowhere. It's no good to find you're missing a wrench half way through the day! Much of the test prep was completed before dawn, when the panels go live. The sun came up and the stack immediately started splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. The team carefully monitored purity and flammability as the sun climbed through the sky. As designed, the stack warmed up and conducted even more power, maintaining solid production until late afternoon when the setting sun shaded the panels. Terraform's synthetic fuel system is uniquely designed to follow the sun and extract the maximum possible value from cheap solar panels. Hydrogen is a pernicious molecule. It leaks through and embrittles metals, burns almost invisibly at a wide range of mixtures in air, burns hot and fast and can easily undergo detonation transition, and has about half a dozen other spookily dangerous properties. My advice is to never work with it unless you absolutely have to. The Terraformer produces and consumes H2 in one compact discrete area with a minimum of complexity and fuss, and as expected this demo was completed in accordance with our rigorous safety standards and no unscheduled excitement! This successful demonstration was also a profound milestone for the team after a testing anomaly last December compelled us to finally rip off the bandaid and move decisively towards the "future design" with half the parts but considerable complexity in assembly. No-one else makes electrolyzers this way and we, more than anyone, know exactly why. And also how to do it anyway, translating directly into a unique cost advantage. A huge congratulation to Ken, Sherman, @ckalitin, Nikhil, Abdullah, and Aaron for their successful test campaign. Terraform's hydrogen and CO2 are the chemical precursors for synthetic methane and methanol, which we make in our own synthetic fuel reactor. Combined, we make oil and gas out of sunlight and air. We are breaking the geological and geographical monopolies on oil production. In the limit, Terraform will deploy these electrolyzers by the millions and they will all be plug-and-play with solar PV arrays. The Muroc smoke test campaign is far from over. We will win!
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