Palantir's AIPCon 10, Ramp Hits $44B, 60 Minutes Considers Rogan | Diet TBPN

**John Coogan** (0:02)
Next, we are live from Palantir AI Pecan. Big news from RAMP today, massive fundraise we're gonna cover in a little bit, but first, you got to talk. Oh, is it still going? I like it. The RAMP song's back.
This was early days. We really talked about RAMP so much, turned into a song. The topic of conversation in DC has, it's still in AI world, but instead of talking about approving models before they're released today, it's about the bio threat. Brandon Gurel wrote in the TBPN newsletter today, the great houses of AI have united behind the bio threat. There's actually a lot more to that because it was a big long list of signatories from AI, but also from the bio world and biotech and even startups. We've seen former guests of the show sign on. I'm excited to bring some of those folks back on the show in the coming weeks and hear more about this because I have this belief that as AI advanced. I think it's a good idea to watch the podcast show, because it was such a tight feedback loop, such a tight verifiable reward. Reinforcement learning works really well in that context. Bio has some similar characteristics.

**Jordi Hays** (1:05)
And it was a very tangible Y2K style moment.

**John Coogan** (1:08)
Exactly.

**Jordi Hays** (1:09)
Where there was, let's just say, a powerful business strategy.

**John Coogan** (1:12)
Yeah, it was like, is it over? You start thinking about the consequences of this, and you don't need to get to AGI super intelligence guide.
We can roll out the networks who we had a chance to talk to yesterday.
He's been very fortunate in implementing the solutions to the cybersecurity threats posed by new AI systems, some of the new AI capabilities that are rolling out. But bio might be next and so it's exciting to see that the great houses of AI are uniting behind the bio threats. Let's take you through this. In 1981, a group of researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus genome in the journal Nature. So they were basically open sourcing the sequence for making polio, which just a few years earlier, polio I think was on the decline by 1981, but a very, very problematic virus. It's an RNA virus, meaning that its nucleobases or building blocks are A, C, G, U, if you're familiar with RNA, adazine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil. Put more plainly, thanks Brandon Gurel, he says when the researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus, it gave the world the literal sequence of polio virus building blocks in order from start to finish. By the mid-20th century, before mass vaccination, polio was paralyzing and killing more than half a million people per year worldwide. So you have this pretty deadly virus killing more than half a million people per year worldwide, and you have just open sourced it. What happens? So in 2002, researchers synthesized infectious polio virus from its publicly available sequence data. So they didn't actually need any of the polio virus RNA to start. They didn't need it on hand. It's not like they took a little sample and they just cloned it up and made it bigger. They just took the data and they made the actual virus. So this is the shape of the threat.
If there's a new virus or an existing virus or forgotten about virus and you have the code to it, you can potentially print that RNA and then have the virus in your hands even if you don't have a sample. Instead, these researchers in 2002, they were able to take the published sequence, chemically synthesized short DNA fragments, assemble them into a full-length DNA copy of the polio virus genome and then use the DNA to make the viral RNA to fully recover the infectious virus. So in 2005, researchers used these same technologies to reconstruct the Spanish flu, a virus in 1918 that killed 675,000 Americans and had a 2-3 percent mortality rate among those infected. Very, very dangerous stuff. So basically, these two reconstructed viruses showed that having a physical virus on hand was no longer necessary as source material to create viruses. All you needed was the blueprints as long as you have the code literally just like text in a text file, a bunch of ATGU. You can go and make this as long as you have the equipment on hand, but that is getting democratized as well. And that's what this AI letter is all about. So that's the situation that we're still in today, except now that we have AI, there are easier ways to potentially reconstruct DNA sequences that could create new viruses. So yesterday, Demis, Hasabas, Sam Altman, Dario Amadei, Alex Wang, and dozens of other high-profile leaders across AI tech policy, nucleic acid synthesis, and biotech signed an open letter called In Support of Mandatory Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening and Record Keeping. You might have seen it on the timeline. And at first glance, Brandon here assumed, and I assumed the same thing, assumed it was another press release from a Frontier lab claiming it had just discovered new capabilities in one of its internal models that would ultimately lead to catastrophe. A lot of this, like, doom, fear-based marketing has been happening. So that was sort of the natural reaction.