AI Viruses, OpenAI's First Device, WSJ Mansion Section | Samir Kaul, Patrick Wendell, Grant LaFontaine

**John Coogan** (0:00)
You're watching TBPN.

**Jordi Hays** (0:02)
Today's Friday, August 7th, 2026 We are live from the TBPN Ultradome.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:07)
Temple of technology. The fortress of finance. The capital of capital.

**Jordi Hays** (0:11)
Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both.
Use these corporate cards.

**Grant LaFontaine** (0:16)
BillPage, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

**Jordi Hays** (0:20)
Lots of voice changer today. Let's amp it up.
Who had orange in the chat? Because the chat was trying to guess what color sunglasses Jordi would be wearing today. Is that orange or is that more of like a burnt sienna?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:37)
Well, I think it's more of a greenish frame with more of an orange line.

**Jordi Hays** (0:42)
You gotta drop the line. I'm wearing sunglasses because I'm looking at the future and it's very bright indeed.
That's a good one.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:49)
I don't know.

**Jordi Hays** (0:50)
No one gets that reference. Anyway.

**Grant LaFontaine** (0:52)
Oh.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:57)
It's great to be back. It's Friday. We got a shorter show for everyone today. We have Samir, general partner of Khosla Ventures, coming on to talk about their new investment Discovery Loop, founded by none other than Jeff Dean and some of his crew from DeepMind. And then we have Patrick Wendell, co-founder of Databricks, joining to talk about their new blog post. I promise it's going to be more exciting than it sounds like.
No, but they're doing smarter model routing and we're excited to catch up with him.

**Jordi Hays** (1:30)
Very excited. Well, for the first time, scientists have used AI to create entirely new viruses.

**Grant LaFontaine** (1:38)
You asked for it.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:39)
They delivered. They woke up and you know what we don't have enough of?

**Jordi Hays** (1:46)
Viruses that have never existed in nature before. It's marked a milestone that could accelerate biotechnology while also raising long-term biosecurity questions. Of course, nightmare scenario is you go to Best Buy, you get a gaming PC with a couple pretty stock graphics cards and you're able to run an open-source model that basically walks you through the steps of creating something really problematic at the same time there's a lot of really talented and well-resourced organizations that are fighting that tooth and nail and so we'll probably see a little back and forth equilibrium there. But lots of interesting questions. Important to note that these viruses do not affect humans whatsoever. Even these new viruses, they target bacteria. So it's more of an experiment, more of a demo, but you can see where things are going and that doesn't make me that comforted, to be honest.

**John Coogan** (2:42)
You like your bacteria and the virus.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:44)
We naturally have, there's bacteria that is part of being human.

**Jordi Hays** (2:49)
And you would like the bacteria to be unaffected by viruses. Is anyone standing up for the bacteria right now?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:55)
Well, it's more so like you have bacteria in your gut.

**Jordi Hays** (2:59)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:59)
And the gut is kind of an important part of the body.

**Jordi Hays** (3:02)
Now that bacteria is going to be suffering from a novel virus apparently.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:05)
Yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (3:05)
Well, in a study published Thursday in Science, researchers at Stanford and the ARC Institute trained an AI model to recognize patterns in naturally occurring viral DNA, then used it to generate genetic sequences for brand new viruses. After synthesizing those DNA sequences and inserting them into bacteria, the team found the bacteria produced viable viruses capable of infecting other bacteria. The work does not create a new threat to humans. Be careful, I'm sure that will get cut out of a lot of messaging around this because it sounds really scary on its face. The AI was trained only on bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, and specifically excluded viruses that infect humans, plants, animals and fungi.
As a result, the model cannot generate viruses capable of infecting people. While scientists have been synthesizing viral genomes for years to study diseases and develop vaccines, this is the first time AI has been used to design entirely new viruses that function in the real world. I was going back and forth before the show on, is this anything special? We've been using tools to make viruses for bacteria for a long time. This is just another tool to do it, or is this some material breakthrough?
That's a debate point. It sounds really scary, but also you've been able to design these viruses in a lab for a long time. So what is the material difference here? I think it all comes back to acceleration and cost. All of a sudden, it becomes 1,000 times cheaper to generate viruses. Then that could reshape biotech in a positive way, but also have biosecurity implications.