AI Got Good at Language. Now It’s Learning the Language of Life. (Eric Nguyen, Co-Founder and CEO of Radical Numerics)

**Eric Nguyen** (0:00)
DNA is this genetic code that makes up a lot of life on Earth. Just last year, one of the things that scientists had used to generate with our models was the first AI genome from scratch. A genome is a complete set of instructions for an organism. They created what's known as a bacteriophage. Something that did not exist in nature, we realized that this power, this potential to create life itself or to manipulate life itself with AI has the potential to reinvent pretty much all of biology. There's more DNA publicly online than all the text on the Internet. And the expressivity power of these models being applied to biology, they're basically as strong as linear regression or logistic regression. Basically this is the vast green space that's open for mining, basically. We don't see any tool out there publicly available on the AI side that can detect dangerous pathogens. So we initially were like, let's just make an API and just host it. For us, this should be pretty simple to do. And then when we started engaging with biosecurity experts, they basically told us like that, don't do that.

**Mario Gabriele** (1:01)
Last year in a lab, researchers sat down at a computer and designed a virus using an AI model called Evo. Not a paper about a virus, but an actual working bacteriophage, built and infectious. Eric Nguyen is one of Evo's creators. He's also the CEO of Radical Numerics, a company building cutting edge AI models for biology, starting with DNA. Since its founding last summer, Radical has raised $50 million from investors like Emergence Capital and Patrick Colson. In today's conversation, Eric and I discuss his winding path to founding Radical, the unique language of DNA, why he believes data isn't the bottleneck for biological models, and why the company that makes it possible to create novel viruses must be the same one that defends against them.
I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist.
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Eric, I've been really excited to have this conversation. I think you're building such a fascinating company and a very important one. I wanted to start maybe with just sort of laying the groundwork and foundation for folks to understand what it is that you're doing. I think a lot of people will maybe have thought about the confluence of AI and biology, but you're doing something quite particular. Maybe you can just give us a rough frame of what Radical Numerics is trying to build.

**Eric Nguyen** (4:03)
Awesome. Thanks for having me here. Very excited as well. Radical Numerics is a new AI research lab.
What we do is teach AI to be able to read, write and essentially program function into DNA. The DNA is this genetic code that makes up a lot of life on earth. And what we think is really important is to train models that not just understand science through natural language, but that can be able to reason across the raw substrate of life itself, this genetic code, like if it was a language. And so our team, what we're known for in the past, we created these models called Evo and Evo 2, which are the first generative models at scale, trained using LLMs on DNA sequences, raw DNA, unlabeled sequences. One of the things that it's known for being able to open up was this idea of being able to generate novel sequences of DNA, things that did not exist in nature.