Introducing Claude for Life Sciences

Science and life
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It took us three months, ultimately, lots of people working day and night in the lab
to fix the problem.
I posed this problem to Claude.
I said, hey, what should we do to get unstuck?
And just in one minute, you know, one response, Claude actually just one-shotted the answer.
Hi, I'm Jonah Kuhl, I'm the head of life sciences focused on partnerships and deployment
here at Anthropic.
Hi, I'm Eric Cotter-Abrams, I'm the head of biology and life sciences here at Anthropic.
I'm focused on research and product development, and together we're trying to teach Claude
to be a biologist.
All right, Eric, let's talk science.
I'm really excited about this and also excited about the fact that Anthropic and, you know,
we're leaning into this space.
And you know, maybe the place to start is just thinking about why the life sciences,
why Claude, and what Anthropic brings to, you know, what is already a really big ecosystem,
but one that's moving really fast.
Yeah, I think that's a really important question.
So I'll start with why are we focused on the life sciences?
And this goes right to the heart of our mission.
I think it's something that a lot of people may not realize, but when we talk about the
beneficial use cases of AI and all the amazing things that we can do in the world with the
frontier AI that we're developing, actually the number one place that we at Anthropic
are excited about applying it is within biology and the life sciences, right?
If you read our foundational material and you talk to people in the hallway here, that's
the primary area where we're really focused on delivering the beneficial impact.
For me, that's been a super exciting thing to come in and plug into is all of that pent
up energy and excitement to apply everything that we have to the space.
And then starting to get more specific in talking about why Claude and how is our approach
as Anthropic, you know, maybe different from some of the other approaches that are out
there.
I think there are two things that come to mind, you know, Joda, you and I have talked
a lot about this, but the first is that we're interested in building tools that empower
individual scientists and enhance the experience of being a scientist, going about your life,
you know, doing all the work that you're doing, right?
So we want to give people the same experience that software engineers have had of, you know,
having a brainstorming partner to work with and delegate tasks to throughout the process.
We want to bring that to biologists in the lab and on the computational side.
And so our initial focus is really about building tools that make scientists more productive
and also make science more fun, right?
Take away some of the grunt work that, you know, everyone would rather get out of and
allow you to focus more on the creative high leverage side.
So that's the first part.
And then the second one is we're really focused not just on the really exciting early stage
discovery problems, right?
Molecule design and protein folding and these, you know, incredibly impactful problems that
many people in the field have focused on.
But we want to address the whole spectrum from early stage discovery all the way through
development and translation.
And so for us, that means, you know, breaking it down into the whole world of different
tasks that exist in the space.
Everything from, you know, drafting and reviewing protocols and debugging them to performing
bioinformatics analyses and writing up your results in slides and papers and that sort
of a thing, right?
There's a whole world of tasks out there that are important.
And we're taking a holistic view and addressing all of them.
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting time to think about science and maybe AI more generally.
And you know, there's this inclination towards, you know, what problem will AI solve for me?
But you know, the way that I think we're thinking about it, the way that you just really nicely
described in the way that in Machines of Love and Grace is maybe also thinking through that
like slightly orthogonal point, which is like, how do we change how we do science?
And that will then impact, you know, solving, you know, structures and molecules and tissues
and imaging and starting to like think through that world.
So you know, with that in mind, maybe then to transition.
So you know, we've seen the power of CLAWD.
I think both of us have experienced this and like the delight and the joy in doing science
with CLAWD and its current capabilities.
But then also now starting to think in the research group that you're leading and how
we advance those capabilities.
And so maybe for a minute, we can just chat a little bit about how kind of current capabilities
and ecosystems and maybe even like extended contacts through MCPs and life sciences start
to create this base case.
And then your thoughts on how we extend that and even like push it further and you know,
what that starts to look like and take shape.
Yeah, totally.
So you know, we've talked about this a lot.
But I think that, you know, it's important to crawl, walk, run in this space, right?
It's a, there's a lot of things about doing biology and having AI, you know, be useful
in science that are different from having AI be useful in science.
It is the AI space.
So maybe you like to use an old running analogy, you know, you start fast, you pick it up in
the middle and you sprint home.
So very little crawling, but just, you know, sprinting and then sprinting faster.
Sprinting, sprinting faster than flying in a rocket ship is really what we're going for
here.
But you know, the very base level is we need CLAWD to be conversant with all of the tools
that scientists are using every day, right?
And so there's a whole ecosystem of important tools and partners out there that we are integrating
with, right?
So we talk about BenchLink on the, you know, experiment administration, lab notebook side
of things.
TEDx Genomics with CellRanger, right?
Incredibly important platform for analyzing single cell experiments and then PubMed for
example, for being able to query the literature, right?
And so these are just three of the three incredibly important partners in a much larger ecosystem.
And so that base level is we need to make sure that CLAWD can talk to all the major
sources that scientists are using throughout their daily work.
And then I think the next level is we want to bring CLAWD to performing at the level
of a superhuman research assistant that can assist you as a scientist throughout all stages
of your project, right?
From the early stage hypothesis generation, when things are more creative and you're reviewing
the literature and you're brainstorming, to the experiment execution phase where you're
drafting protocols and you're debugging things in the lab and even actually running those
experiments in the lab, to the computational and data analysis side of things, right?
When you're running your bioinformatics scripts, you're doing machine learning on top of that
or some statistics and you're presenting the results to your colleagues or for yourself,
right?
And so here, this is where we've broken down tasks into all of those areas, right?
And we're figuring out, all right, how do we evaluate how well our models are doing
those tasks and how do we rapidly improve performance in all of those areas?
So we're making a big investment in doing that right now.
And I think it's also important to say that we're not just doing this generically, right?
In some ways, you can't speak of life sciences as one monolithic thing, right?
There's all these different subfields within it.
And we have a particular sequencing in mind where we like to think of it as being consisting
of this core of important tasks that are shared throughout many different fields.
And then within that, there are different subdomains that are really important, right?
And we want to address all of it.
But we're really focused on starting with that core that's going to be useful throughout
the whole journey.
I mean, one thing that I'm really ecstatic about with our current partners and folks
that are involved early on here to build this foundation, especially with MCPs, is that
you mentioned 10X Genomics, you mentioned PubMed, you mentioned groups like BenchLink
and then Sage Bionetworks, BioRender, you know, kind of going back to that last point,
it really demonstrates and hopefully puts to action the fact that it's not just solving
a problem.
But, you know, in that group, you've got the literature, you've got instrumentation, you've
got analytical workflows, you've got the cherry on top with that perfect image or network
diagram and BioRender.
And I expect that over the weeks, months to come, that whole ecosystem is just going to
grow exponentially.
And with that, the power for more and more scientists, and I think that's just incredibly
cool and exciting.
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
That's the experience that a lot of us have had on the software side, right?
For me, I've always been, on the one hand, a part of the software world, the other hand,
a part of this bio world.
And, you know, things started on the software side where you'd give Claude, you know, these
little snippets of tasks, right?
Over time, those tasks become longer horizon, Claude becomes more autonomous, you know,
can more seamlessly integrate to the different tools there.
And I think we're right at that takeoff point in the life sciences where we're just now,
with all of these connections that we're introducing, able to unlock that next stage where, you
know, you don't have to just ask Claude to go perform an analysis and then you do some
work and then you come back and you make a biorender figure and you ask Claude to revise
it, right?
We could actually give Claude a whole, you know, meaningful chunk of the work that would
take a human scientist a couple hours to do.
I think that transition is the really exciting point in a field where it goes from being,
you know, a useful kind of utility to actually a brainstorming partner, right?
Which is what I've heard.
It's just kind of like embedded in the process.
A collaborator, yeah.
So we recently released SONNET 4.5, a really exciting, super powerful model.
And I think one of the things that we've seen and, you know, eager to hear your perspective
on the research side is just like seeing how that model performs in the context of different
areas of science.
And so, you know, what have you seen maybe in the evolution and the power of those models
and maybe some of the early evals or benchmarks that we've been seeing in different tasks
that are relevant to scientists?
So I think there's two things about SONNET 4.5 that I'm really excited about that have
enhanced my own work by a great deal.
The first is that it's our first model that's undergone extensive scientific training.
So SONNET 4.5, you know, is skilled in many different domains of science.
And I think one of the exciting things is that there's a lot there that generalizes,
right?
And so SONNET 4.5 being better at math, you know, has some effect of uplifting different
capabilities in bio, especially in the computational side.
And so I think it's just really exciting that it's our first, you know, scientifically,
you know, really, really capable model.
And you know, there were some new things on the training side that went into making that
possible that we're just leaning into it, accelerating with all future models here.
And the second thing is its ability to do long horizon tasks, right?
Consisting of long strings of different tool calls.
So this is something that, you know, for anyone that's done these sorts of long bioinformatics
pipelines and things like that, is absolutely critical.
And we saw a major jump up in those capabilities with SONNET 4.5, which, you know, makes it,
you know, uniquely able to start to do these like really long bioinformatics workflows.
Yeah, I think in the analysis workflows and also thinking about how it applies to the
different surfaces of CLOD, you know, a lot of people think about CLOD and they think,
you know, the chat interface.
But of course, I think for many scientists, maybe some that do, maybe some that don't
realize this, the power of agentic coding tools like CLOD code or other places where
that longer context and all that power becomes really interesting for data analysis, for
integration, for kind of like reasoning over different types of knowledge.
And it's an incredible like starting point, right, where we can start to build.
Yeah, it really is.
And I know this is one of the things that you and I have been the most excited about,
that CLOD code is amazingly useful as it is today in biology.
And most people don't realize that, right?
It's called CLOD code.
It's not called CLOD biology, right?
But, you know, underneath the hood there, there's a really powerful general purpose
agent that I, in particular, you know, many people that we've talked to throughout the
community have started to use in bioinformatics, even in things like drafting papers,
right, and in performing literature reviews and organizing your projects.
So I think that that's definitely something that we're going to be putting a lot more
energy into.
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's those moments and as a technologist and someone that loves
to develop technologies and apply them to biology, which is an affinity that I know
we both share, you know, there are those moments where you see technologies or kind of like
experience technologies and you just like really feel them.
And I still have that moment of like uplift, you know, remembering the first time like
playing with CLOD code and making tasks that are either kind of beyond my technical
capabilities, tractable and manageable, or the tasks of just, you know, like workflow
running and execution that are just time intensive and cumbersome, trivial, right?
I mean, it just like puts those tools in scientists' hands in a way that is incredibly
powerful.
It really is.
And, you know, you mentioning those moments where you just viscerally feel, you know,
the new capabilities that are out there, that reminds me of that moment for me that really
woke me up for the first time.
And this was actually back in the SONNET 3.5 days that, wow, these LLMs and these frontier
models are really relevant for what we're doing in the life sciences.
So for me, that moment was at the time I was running a biotech company that I had founded
and I had this idea that I wanted to try to see, to see, hey, if I had had access to CLOD
when I was starting this company five years ago, how much time would it have saved us?
And how much heartache in trying to navigate some of these really difficult R&D problems
we're trying to solve, would it have saved us?
And I'll never forget this because the very first huge technical roadblock that we ran
into when we founded this company, there was a problem we were developing an assay, you
know, trying to detect in this case COVID.
And we, it wasn't working.
We were getting inhibited by the sample matrix and we couldn't figure it out.
Right.
And it took us three months, ultimately, and lots of people working day and night in the
lab to fix the problem.
And I posed this problem to CLOD.
I said, hey, we're trying to develop this assay and we're seeing that the sample is
inhibiting things.
And what should we do to get unstuck?
And just in one minute, you know, one response, CLOD actually just one-shotted the answer
and said, hey, I think you should add this much of this chemical into the mix.
And, you know, that was a really eye-opening moment, right?
That here in conversing with CLOD, you know, you're kind of talking to a distilled version
of the totality of scientific knowledge.
And at the time it was imperfect, but it's rapidly getting better.
There's always this tension.
And I think scientists want perfection, right?
It's something that we all kind of like strive for and want that specificity.
But for a lot of the work that holds science back, protocol optimization, you know, an
imperfect but helpful answer is the sort of thing that we go to, you know, the most trusted
colleagues where they might say like, I don't know if, but like this looks familiar, right?
Like I've seen this problem at some point.
They're those kind of like sage professors.
They're the like super sharp student, you know, down the hall.
And again, it's not looking for perfection, but it's looking to get unstuck.
It's looking to be helpful.
It's looking to just like keep you moving and like towards discovery, which is what
we're all looking for, right?
Yeah, totally.
Totally.
And I think the other area that really jumped out for me early on was, you know, this is
relevant later in the translation phase, is in the regulatory process, right?
So I've spent a lot of time writing regulatory submissions, going through those processes
with FDA and, you know, Claude is really capable there.
And I think there's a huge opportunity both on the industry side and on the FDA side to
recognize that we have these tools that can, you know, speed up the process on both sides
and facilitate consistent standards across the board.
And I'm really excited about pursuing that.
And I know people, you know, across this whole industry are as well.
Okay, so let's stick on this for a minute.
You know, within biology, within AI, maybe even if you take a step back from AI and think
about just like engineering and technology, you know, the life sciences, biology is this,
you know, frequent substrate where people get really excited about the idea of biology
or how it's just like one step away from being like immediately programmable.
Some of those ideas and intuitions I think we probably agree with.
But I think in many cases, you know, it's folks that are maybe more in love with the
idea of biology as opposed to like really know what the life sciences, what regulatory
frameworks look like.
Let's talk a little bit more about, you know, your experience, our collective experience
as scientists and kind of like bringing some of that detailed knowledge to our partnerships,
to our research efforts and, you know, what those moments have looked like for you in
the past and how they're maybe like reading on to priorities or approaches.
Yeah, I think this is a really important and also pretty fun topic to talk about, right?
In some ways, it's one of the oldest tropes in the space of the computer scientist, the
physicist, the mathematician that kind of waltzed into biology and have all these romantic
notions and then, you know, spend their first year in the lab and come out kind of shell
shocked and, you know, in some ways disillusioned of all the things that are possible, right?
I think that, you know, where you and I both are coming from and the way that we're doing
things here is we know what life in the lab is like and we want to solve the real problems
that are the bottlenecks for this field, right?
I will say that that's my own background.
I'm coming more of the computer side side and the math side of things and have picked
up bio, you know, over the years in being in the lab and I'm not disillusioned.
I really believe that we have the opportunity to massively uplift the capabilities of biologists
in doing incredible, impactful research and that with the tools that we have now, you
know, we're finally at that moment where all these things are possible.
So I remain the same optimism that I had when I first got into this.
I think, you know, all the experience in the lab has been really clarifying to help point
out, okay, there are real problems here that are not pretty and that require, you know,
lots of grindy work to get in there and disentangle.
But I think we're now set up to make a dent in that.
So, yeah, but I'd love to hear what you think.
Yeah, I mean, I totally agree, right?
I mean, I share that optimism.
I do think that there are many people that don't always understand like how difficult
science is, but also how important just persistence and the fact that, you know, research and
I think this probably applies, you know, down the clinical pipeline too, you know, it's
because it's so difficult, because there's so much knowledge that needs to be incorporated
in every like step and debugging and the complexity of biology, whether it's that protocol
optimization or data analysis, it's really hard to hold all that expertise, definitely
in one person, probably not even in one group and infrequently in one institution.
And the result of that, and I think where, again, we provide a really powerful technology
in CLAWD and a, you know, research assistant collaborator is it starts to like bring more
of that fluidity, right?
It lowers the bar for computational analysis for folks that may not have that computer
science background.
It brings some molecular biology and optimization skills for folks that haven't spent their
whole life, you know, cloning and doing molecular biology.
And then it also just like helps make discoveries, you know, transferable across fields, right?
I mean, I was not trained as a neuroscientist.
I used to love to go to neuroscience lectures, but would then have to like come back and
either like ask a whole bunch of naive questions.
But, you know, seeing optogenetics for the first time, you know, discovered in neuroscience
took way too long to get out to cell biology, to other domains.
And I think the power of CLAWD and CLAWD as a life scientist is it starts to like address
some of those core problems in biology, but also just starts to create that fluidity and
start to break down walls and some of the parts that makes science hard.
I totally agree.
And the other thing I want to mention when we're talking about our outlook and our research
roadmap and things like that is, you know, we focused a lot on the meat and potatoes
and eating vegetables of, you know, all of these practical tasks, right?
That are really exciting, but more sort of surface level.
I also want to call out that we're seeing an increasing trend in, you know, the field
focusing on these biofoundation models.
These models that have savant-like capabilities on biological modalities, right?
DNA sequences and protein sequences and being multimodal and expression data and all sorts
of things.
And a trend that's really interesting to watch is seeing, you know, increasing number of
papers come out over time that are demonstrating that these things that previously looked like
you needed these specialized biomodels for, maybe you don't.
And maybe actually with, you know, really large frontier scale models like Claude, with
the right type of training, we can start to develop those capabilities.
And so I think we're all as a field at the beginning of just sort of working through
that, but I think it's a really, really exciting trend to follow and that we'll be pursuing
pretty aggressively, right?
Because I think having these savant-like capabilities in these biomodalities is really powerful
for these specific biofoundation models.
But to really make that accessible to people, you need to be able to interface it with language,
right?
And so I wanted to call that out as one interesting.
Yeah, I mean, it's a great point that, you know, as the field progresses here, my field
here, I mean, both, you know, the field of AI, but also like many domains of life sciences.
And I think we're already seeing a whole bunch of really exciting, you know, partners that
are the AI native startups in the biotech space that are kind of taking some of these
tools as well as large pharma partners.
And the way that the different pieces come together, right?
So biofoundation models, general intelligence models, specific datasets, you know, it's
going to be fascinating, right?
And I think a really exciting time.
And maybe this also gets to the point of partnership, right?
So starting to take those different pieces and like bringing them together and how we
think about partnerships, maybe some of the early learnings or opportunities or partnerships
that have been front of mind for you or kind of a philosophy of like building this ecosystem.
Yeah.
So the way that I think about it is we know what our North Star is.
We want to enable the amazing world that Dario writes about in Machines of Loving Grace,
in which, you know, R&D throughout the life sciences is accelerated by at least an order
of magnitude.
We want to make that happen as soon as possible.
And within that framing, I think about partnerships as we need to make sure that all the right
pieces exist, right?
Some of those pieces we're going to do ourselves, right?
A lot on the model training side, some on the product side as well.
But other pieces, you know, it makes sense for us to just find the right partners and
make sure that we're supporting as much as we can.
And so when I think about the different types of partners, there's really important ecosystem
partners, right?
Like I would call out Benchling is one of those for us where, you know, I think they
have, you know, the majority of working, you know, bioscientists are using Benchling is
how they engage every day with kind of managing and running their experiments and their data.
And so that's really, you know, important one for us to lean into.
And I think there's a lot of exciting things that we'll be able to share soon that we're
working on together.
So that's one type of a partner.
Another type is a partner that we want to work with in which they're using what we're
building to actually do science, you know, in a way that wasn't possible before, right?
Whether it's doing more science per unit time, right?
Getting more impactful results per unit time than they could otherwise, or making a type
of discovery that wasn't possible before, right?
And so there, you know, there's a few partnerships that we're pretty excited about.
I think one that's worth mentioning is with the Ark Institute.
I know that you're thinking a lot about this as well.
So we'd love to hear your thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, I think the, you know, the affinity that we both had towards Anthropic because
of the unique features of the models, you know, there's like deep thinking.
I don't think it's an accident, actually, that so many scientists have gravitated towards
using CLAW just, you know, naturally.
But then also Dario's vision, and I think the vision that we very much believe in, which
is, you know, our goal is to accelerate, right?
It's 100 years of science that is possible in 10.
That's bold.
It's ambitious.
But also, I think the more you think about it, and the more you think about what holds
science back, it's achievable.
And so I agree, you know, within the life sciences and biology, I think the other thing
that's unique is that it's an ecosystem that is incredibly continuous and fluid, right?
The student that is in a lab and finishing their thesis one day is the founder of an
AI-native startup, you know, the next that is then like acquired or working with or advancing,
you know, major pipelines at, you know, AI-forward pharma companies like Lilly.
And, you know, that fluidity and thinking about kind of that entire partnership in that
ecosystem, I think is that that's the beneficial deployment.
It's all of science and achieving that.
The thing that I'm really excited about, and maybe one feature you didn't touch on, is
our AI for Science program.
And this is really looking to put tools and clod into the hands of scientists that have
a bold idea or a big project, and they think that clod can, you know, be useful to sulk
in that.
And I think it's a great way to, you know, power early-stage discovery research.
It's a great way for us to kind of lean into those partners and work with them closely
and then learn from them and like start to just, you know, keep drawing the aperture
open and understanding, like in these early days, you know, what is working really well
and, you know, frankly, equally important, like what isn't working well.
And, you know, I think we both believe in the power, but also believe in the current
imperfection.
And so that opportunity to, you know, work with scientists, accelerate their research,
judge success based on, you know, what their success is, their discovery, their acceleration,
their time, and start to see where we're doing pretty well and maybe some areas where we
just need to be doing a lot better.
Yeah, I'm really excited about that too.
And I think that's such an important point, right?
Like in this conversation, we've been emphasizing a lot of breaking the problem down into all
these pieces that we're going to solve independently.
But the most important part is when we put it all back together and scientists are actually
using these things, you know, how's it going and what are we doing, right?
And so I think the AI for Science program is critical for us to get that feedback and
be closing the loop with people that are using these things every day in the lab.
And so I am super excited about that.
One other point that I think is really important to make that, you know, speaks to why Anthropic
and why the experience of doing this within Anthropic is so exciting, it's such a perfect
fit, is that as we're talking about accelerating and enhancing capabilities, right, the other
side of that is safety and the tremendous responsibility that we all have to making
sure that we are improving the model's capabilities and releasing, you know, increasingly impactful
products in a way that is responsible and aligned with our responsible scaling policy
and best practices in the biosecurity community.
It's something I care deeply about.
I've worked in biosecurity for years and I think that, you know, at most companies, right,
there would be some tension between the impact and the commercial aims of making these models
better in biology, right, and the safety and responsibility side of, you know, slowing
down when we need to and making sure that we're being careful and have all the right
safeguards in place.
But at Anthropic, we don't have that tension, right?
That's our DNA as a company.
I think that's so valuable here.
It's also really familiar, you know, to everyone in the life sciences, right, for people that
are developing therapeutics and medical technologies, right, on the one hand, you have your product
development arm and your commercial goals, and on the other hand, you have a quality
management system, right, which is a set of procedures and practices that govern everything
you do in order to make sure that you're doing so safely, right?
And so I think it's just such a natural fit, you know, our approach here to AI of making
sure that developing really powerful AI goes well and is done safely and what needs to
happen in the life sciences, right?
And so that's something that I'm personally really excited about that I also think is
a big part of who we are as a partner in this field.
Right, yeah, it's an assumption, right?
Like we have to do that.
We owe it to ourselves.
We owe it to scientists.
We owe it to the world to take those sorts of questions really seriously.
Yeah, and I think the other thing that I think about a lot is like at our core, at our DNA,
we're a research organization.
I don't think you can say that about all other AI companies, you know, Frontier Labs,
etc., but I think being a research organization allows us to engage with researchers, labs,
other research organizations in a way that really creates kind of a shared sense of like
ownership and goals and working together, right?
Like we want to advance the technologies and see them put to, you know, the full purpose
and power and are really invested in seeing that forward.
Yeah, I think we're really lucky that that's the case.
And yeah, I feel that very viscerally that so many people on our founding team and our
leadership team and just throughout all levels and teams in the organization are scientists,
many by training, many by nature and disposition.
And, you know, I think that you can feel that sort of, you know, in all the work that we do,
it makes it, you know, so natural to just go out and get to work with other scientists and
all these things.
And, you know, it's a little bit like, you know, the monkeys are running the zoo, right?
Where we have people that are so passionate about science driving the ship.
And I think that it means that we get to have a lot of fun.
Yeah.
But I think it also, it's a lot of fun, but also that appreciation for
core questions like safety and understanding what the power is.
And also core, you know, questions about like, what are the right problems to solve?
And, you know, an appreciation for what makes science hard, what slows science down.
You know, if we need to make 100 years of progress in 10,
well, you know, what does that actually look like, right?
And, you know, you can draw back the veil of science.
And, you know, there are some of those things of just understanding the literature, right?
Like you can spend all day, every day.
As a matter of fact, I think a lot of scientists would probably love to spend all day,
every day reading the literature.
But like, even then you'd get through, you know, some small,
tiny fraction of what was published or pre-printed at any given moment.
So it's just impossible to keep up, right?
But Claude can keep up.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let's talk a little bit maybe here at the end about, you know,
the future of life science work.
And, you know, we've talked about bioinformatics and coding.
We've talked about some, you know, clinical work and different work
that has been like demonstrated by some early partners.
And then maybe also just ways that we're thinking about like building this up
and continuing to develop new partnerships, push the models towards greater capabilities.
Where do you go when you start to think about the future?
Yeah.
So when we start to think about the future, you know, I think first,
we need to make sure that Claude has all of the foundational knowledge
that any scientist in the bio world would have, right?
So things like understanding protein structural biology, right?
And being able to look at a molecule from organic chemistry
and understand its structure and function, things like that, right?
And so once you establish that base,
then I think there's some really exciting places that we can go after that.
Where one of the ones that I really like to talk about and that I think is critical
is Claude actually learning to execute experiments in the lab, right?
I think in order to get to this world where we're all going, that needs to happen.
And again, this is a problem that for so long, you know,
we've been making a lot of progress,
maybe not as much as some had hoped for, right?
In terms of this vision of automating the tedious work of life in the lab.
But I believe that it's possible now.
And I think that that's a really important area where we have to drill in and focus on.
And I think, you know, just pause for a moment
as to what life will be like when we get there.
It'll be incredible, right?
We'll be able to go from, you know, talking to Claude about an experiment
to designing an experimental plan with Claude
to having Claude draft the protocols.
And right, you can go back and forth on them.
And then when you're ready, you can say,
okay, now go run those experiments and I'll review the data right in the morning.
And so I think that's critical for closing the loop
and enabling that acceleration that we're talking about.
And the other thing that I think is a really important theme for our future research is
in biology, as with any domain in science,
we have the opportunity to learn directly from real data from nature, right?
And so on the one hand, we do a lot of model training and learning
on annotations that are created by humans and other datasets
that are either curated or created by humans, right?
But there is an opportunity here to really do sort of lab-in-the-loop
active learning from high-throughput biomeasurements.
And the other reason why bio is such a good fit for that is
we really, you know, are every year on a scaling law
of the number of experiments, right, per unit
that we can do, right, in terms of the throughput of these systems.
So those are two themes that I'm increasingly excited about where,
you know, when you start thinking about
how do we move beyond human capabilities in these tasks, right?
At some point, we're going to saturate learning from human experts.
The answer is to get the data from the lab.
Yeah, I think this is a great theme.
And the other thing that maybe I would point to is
I think there's still this huge overhang, if you will,
in terms of, like, current capabilities in use.
And one of the things that sticks out to me is, like,
it's starting to get clawed in the classroom in basic training,
like really, you know, kind of implemented in a deep way
such that, you know, many scientists are using Claude
and also that experience and the product,
you know, starts to have this very cohesive feel
where Claude is that virtual assistant and that virtual scientist
that is helping not answer a problem,
but, you know, answer a scientist, answer any problem.
All right, Eric, this has been awesome.
I mean, it's always fun to talk science.
Sounds like we've got a lot of work to do.
So thanks for taking the time
and really looking forward to the future of Claude,
life sciences, and pushing towards the frontier.
Yeah, thank you, Joda.
This has been a lot of fun and we're just getting started.
