In this episode, Jacob sits down with Joshua Meier, co-founder of Chai Discovery and former Chief AI Officer at Absci, to explore the breakthrough moment happening in AI drug discovery. They discuss how the field has evolved through three distinct waves, with the current generation of companies finally achieving success rates that seemed impossible just years ago.
The conversation covers everything from moving drug discovery out of the lab and into computers, to why AI models think differently than human chemists, to the strategic decisions around open sourcing foundational models while keeping design capabilities proprietary. It's an in-depth look at how AI is fundamentally changing pharmaceutical innovation and what it means for the future of medicine.
Check out the full Chai-2 Zero-Shot Antibody report linked here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.05.663018v1.full.pdf
(0:00) Intro
(2:10) The Evolution of AI in Drug Discovery
(6:09) Current State and Future of AI in Biotech
(11:15) Challenges and Modalities in Therapeutics
(15:19) Data Generation and Model Training
(23:59) Open Source and Model Development at Chai
(28:35) Protein Structure Prediction and Diffusion Models
(30:57) Open Source Models and Their Impact
(35:41) How Should Chai-2 Be Used?
(39:34) The Future of AI in Pharma and Biotech
(43:51) Key Milestones and Metrics in AI-Driven Drug Discovery
(48:24) Critiques and Hesitation
(55:06) Quickfire
With your co-hosts:
@jacobeffron
- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health
@patrickachase
- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn
@ericabrescia
- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)
@jordan_segall
- Partner at Redpoint
