Congratulations to Molly Gibson, Geoffrey von Maltzahn, and the entire team at Lila Sciences for today’s official launch and spotlight in the The New York Times!
Origination Partner @ Flagship Pioneering | Co-founder, President @ Lila Sciences | Co-founder @ Generate Biomedicines
Today is a special milestone in an exciting early build that I’ve had the privilege of being a part of at Flagship Pioneering: we are launching Lila Sciences which was featured in an exclusive by The New York Times with Steve Lohr: https://lnkd.in/e_qA8c6r At Lila, our mission is to build Scientific Superintelligence to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. A few years ago, this mission might have sounded crazy, but today, we believe it is the most important thing we can be working on as scientists. We still have a lot of work to do, we aren’t there yet, but we believe there is a path, and we are bringing innovations together in AI, software, hardware, and science to hopefully make it possible. Today, I want to celebrate the journey, the build, and the people. After building companies for a decade now, I can confidently say – it’s the people that make it all possible. And I want to say a huge THANK YOU to those who have impacted where are today as well as where we are going. This journey started over 2 years ago, with a couple of novel insights. First, that Generative AI has the potential to transform the physical sciences in an equally impactful way to what we’ve seen in biology. If we could do this, we could generate novel technologies to help us solve important environmental and sustainability challenges and work to protect the planet’s health for future generations (with two littles at home, the importance of this goal hits harder than ever for me). This technology was pioneered by Alexandra Sneider, John Gregoire, and Rafael Gómez Bombarelli and joined by Jonathan Hennek and Scott Robertson to help translate these technologies to the market. At the same time, we imagined a future where we could use AI to “close the loop” between experiments and machine learning. If we could do this, we could accelerate and create novel discoveries in life sciences that wouldn’t have been possible previously. This technology was pioneered by Jacob Feala, Ben Kompa, Maya Jay, Andrew Beam, David Bellamy, and many others. Alongside the vision of Geoffrey von Maltzahn and Noubar Afeyan, we imagined something even greater by pulling these two innovations together: an ability for AI to run the entire wheel of science across biology, chemistry, and materials science and pull discoveries that could otherwise be decades away into the present. By learning across diverse domains of science, we improve our understanding of each individual domain. With each turn of the wheel of science, scientific intelligence increases. And Lila Sciences was born. We’ve been lucky to be joined by some remarkable people along the way to help us expand scientific creativity in new ways (George Church, Kenneth Stanley) as well as across the rest of the org – all here to create a new kind of intelligence in the world, for good. I couldn’t be more proud to be working with this brilliant group of people (and many others)!