Can AI reinvent biology? 

A new season of CrazyStupidTech has begun, with my co-writer Fred Vogelstein turning his attention to a new company from one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence. 

Generative AI has dominated recent discourse, but the impact of artificial intelligence extends far beyond consumer applications. Take Inceptive, for example. The startup, co-founded by Jakob Uszkoreit (co-author of the seminal Transformer paper) and Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das, marries AI and biology to create “biological software.” It is an ambitious goal. 

The company aims to revolutionize drug development through RNA design. Its approach isn’t just about accelerating drug discovery; it hopes to fundamentally reimagine how we create biological interventions through RNA manipulation.

Inceptive has a novel approach to data generation and model training. Unlike competitors who rely heavily on public datasets, it’s creating its own biological data through careful experimentation, deliberately including “noise” that helps itsAI systems learn more effectively. This novel hybrid approach, combining wet lab work with computational methods, will push biology research in new directions. While previous efforts to merge these fields often felt like forcing a square peg into a round hole, Inceptive’s founders are essentially creating a new language that speaks to both domains.

The real innovation might be organizational rather than technical. By forcing biologists and AI researchers to literally meet in the middle (their “beach” area between labs), they’re creating a new cultural framework for interdisciplinary research. This approach could prove as important as their technical breakthroughs.

You can read the full conversation with Jakob Uszkoreit on CrazyStupidTech.