EVERY SPOKEN WORD
35 min read · 7,225 words- 0:00 – 0:50
Introductions
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
It took us three months, ultimately, lots of people working day and night in the lab to, 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.
- JCJonah Cool
Hi, I'm Jonah Cool. I'm the Head of Life Sciences focused on partnerships and deployment here at Anthropic.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Hi, I'm Eric Kauderer-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.
- JCJonah Cool
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, uh, 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.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah, I think that's a really important
- 0:50 – 4:10
Anthropic's commitment to advancing life sciences
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
question. So I'll, I'll start with why are we focused on the life sciences? And, um, 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 know, you talk to people in the hallway here, um, that's the primary area where we're really focused on, on delivering, um, the, the beneficial impact. For me, that-that's been a super exciting thing to come in and, and plug into is all of that pent-up energy and excitement to apply everything that we have to, to this 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, that are out there. Um, I think there are two things that, that come to mind. You know, Jonah, you and I have, have talked a lot about this, but, um, 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, uh, you know, having a brainstorming partner to work with and delegate tasks to throughout the process. Uh, we want to bring that to biologists in the lab and on the computational side. Um, and so, um, our initial focus is really about building tools that make scientists more productive, um, and also make science more fun.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Right? Take away some of the, the grunt work that, you know, everyone would rather get out of, um, and allow you to focus more on the, the creative high-leverage side. Um, so that's the first part, and then, uh, the second one is we're really focused not just on the really exciting early-stage discovery problems, right? Uh, molecule design and protein folding and these, you know, incredibly impactful problems that, that many people in the field have focused on. Uh, 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. Um, everything from, you know, drafting and reviewing protocols and debugging them to performing bioinformatics analysis 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, um, and we're taking a holistic view in addressing all of them.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah, I think it's, it's a really interesting time to think about science and, 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, the way that I think we're thinking about it, the way that you just really nicely described, and the way that, uh, in Machines of Loving 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, um, and starting to, like, think through that, uh, world. So, you know, with that in mind, maybe then to transition. So, you know, we've seen the power of, uh, Claude. I think both of us have experienced this and, like, the, the delight and the joy in doing science with Claude, um, and its current capabilities. But then also now starting to think in the research group that, that you're leading and how we
- 4:10 – 9:05
"Turning Claude into a scientist" with MCP servers, skills, partnerships, and more
- JCJonah Cool
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, uh, you know, what that starts to look like and, and take shape.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah, totally. So, uh, you know, we've talked about this a lot. I think that, you know, it's important to crawl, walk, run in this space, right? Um, it's, uh, there's a lot of things about doing biology and, and having AI, you know, be useful in science that, that are different from having AI be useful-
- JCJonah Cool
It is the AI space, so maybe you like to use an old running analogy. You know, you, you start fast, you pick it up in the middle, and you sprint home.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
[laughs]
- JCJonah Cool
So very little crawling, but just, you know-
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Exactly
- JCJonah Cool
... sprinting and then sprinting faster.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Sprinting, sprinting faster, then flying in a rocket ship-
- JCJonah Cool
Exactly
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... is really right what we're going for here.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Um, but, you know, the, the very base level is we need Claude to be conversant with all of the tools that scientists are using every day.
- JCJonah Cool
Got it.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
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 Benchling on the, you know, experiment administration, lab notebook side of things, 10x Genomics with CellRanger, right? Incredibly important platform for, um, analyzing single-cell experiments, and then PubMed, for example, for being able to query the literature, right? And so th-these are just three of, uh, three incredibly important partners in a much larger ecosystem. And so that, that base level is we need to, um, make sure that Claude can, can talk to all the major sources that scientists are using throughout, you know, their, their daily work. And then I think the next level is we wanna bring Claude to performing at the level of a, a superhuman research assistant that can assist you as, 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 experimentExecution phase where you're drafting protocols and you're debugging things in the lab and, and even actually running those experiments in the lab, uh, to the, uh, 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 colleagues or for yourself, right? And so here, this is where we've, 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 and-- are, are doing those tasks and, um, how do we, you know, rapidly improve performance in, in all of those areas. So we-we're making a big investment in, in doing that right now. Um, and I think it's also important to say that we're, you know, we're not just doing this generically, right? Like i-in some ways it-it-- you can't speak of life sciences as one monolithic thing, right? There's all these different subfields within it. Um, and, uh, we have a particular sequencing in mind where we like to think of it as being consisting of this core of, you know, important tasks that are shared throughout many different fields. Um, and then within that, there are different sub-domains that are really important, right? Uh, and we want to address all of it, uh, but we're really focused on starting with that core that, that's gonna be useful throughout the whole journey.
- JCJonah Cool
And then, you know, one thing that I'm really, um, excited about with our current partners and, you know, folks that are involved early on here to build this foundation, especially with MCPs, is, you know, you mentioned 10x Genomics, you mentioned PubMed, you mentioned groups like Benchling and then, you know, SageBionetworks, BioRender. You know, kind of going back to that last point, it, 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, the cherry on top with that, like, perfect image or, you know, network diagram in BioRender. And I, I expect that over the weeks, months to come, like, that whole ecosystem is just gonna grow exponentially. Um, and with that, like, the power for more and more scientists, and I think that's just, like, in-incredibly cool and exciting.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah, I think that's a great point, is that that's the experience that, um, you know, 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, uh, you know, things started on the software side, where you'd give Claude, you know, these little snippets of tasks, right? And over time, those tasks become longer horizon. Claude becomes more autonomous, you know, can more seamlessly integrate through 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, of the work that would take a human scientist a couple hours to do.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
I think that 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, a brainstorming partner-
- JCJonah Cool
Right.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
-which is what, what I've-
- JCJonah Cool
Okay. It's just kind of like embedded in the, in the
- 9:05 – 20:00
Training Sonnet 4.5 for long-horizon tasks in life sciences
- JCJonah Cool
process.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
A collaborator.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah. So we, 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, like, the evolution and the power of those models and maybe some of the early evals or benchmarks that we've been seeing in, in different tasks that are relevant to scientists?
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
So I think there's two things about Sonnet 4.5 that, that I'm really excited about that have enhanced my own work by, by a great deal. Um, the first is that it's our first model that's under-undergone extensive scientific training.
- JCJonah Cool
Yep.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
So, um, Sonnet 4.5, um, you know, is, 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, uh, I, I think it's just really exciting that it's our first, you know, scientifically, you know, really, really capable model.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Um, and uh, you know, there were some new things on, on the training side that went into making that possible that, that we're just leaning into it, accelerating with, with all future models here. Um, 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, um, is absolutely critical. Um, and, um, we, we saw a major jump up in, in those capabilities with Sonnet 4.5, um, which, you know, makes it, you know, uniquely able to start to do these, like, really long bioinformatics workflows.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah, I think in the, the analysis workflows and also thinking about how it applies to the different surfaces of Claude. So, you know, a lot of people think about Claude and they think, you know, the, the chat interface. But of course, I think for many scientists, uh, maybe some that do, maybe some that don't realize this, the power of agentic coding tools like Claude 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-
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah.
- JCJonah Cool
-uh, it's, it's an incredible, like, starting point, right? Where-
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah.
- JCJonah Cool
-that we can start to, to build.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah, it really is. And I know this is one of the things that, that you and I have been the most excited about, that Claude Code is amazingly useful as it is today in biology. And, and most people don't realize that, right?
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
It's called Claude Code. It's not called Claude Biology, right? Uh, but, uh, you know, underneath the hood there, there's a really powerful general-purpose agent that, uh, I in particular, you know, many people that we've talked to throughout the community have started to, to use in bioinformatics, um, even in things like drafting papers, right? And in performing literature reviews and organizing your projects, right? And so, uh, I think that that's definitely something that we're, we're gonna be putting a lot more energy into.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I-- you know, there's, 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, I know we both share-You know, there, there are those moments where you see technologies or kind of like experience technologies, and you just like really feel them, and I, I still have that moment of like uplift, you know, remembering the first time like playing with Claude Code and making tasks that are either kinda 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.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
It really is. And, uh, you know, you mentioning those moments where you just viscery-viscerally-
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... feel, you know, the, the new capabilities that, that are out there, that reminds me of, uh, that moment for me that really woke me up for the first time. Um, and this was actually back in the Sonnet 3.5 days that, wow, these, these LLMs and, uh, these frontier models are, are really relevant for, for what we're doing in the life sciences. And so for me, that moment was, um, at the time, uh, 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 Claude 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 were trying to solve would it have saved us?" And, um, I'll never forget this because the, the very first huge technical roadblock that we ran into when we founded this company, uh, there was a problem. We were developing an assay-
- JCJonah Cool
Mm-hmm
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... you know, trying to detect, in this case, COVID. And, um, uh, 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 a-and, you know, lots of people working day and night in the lab to, to fix the problem. Um, and I posed this problem to Claude. I said, "Hey, uh, we're trying to develop this assay, and we're, we're seeing that the sample is, is inhibiting things, and, uh, what should we do to get unstuck?" And just in one minute, you know, one response, Claude actually just one-shotted the answer-
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... and said, "Hey, I think you should add this much of this chemical, you know, into the mix." Um, and you know, that, that was a really eye-opening moment, right? That here, um, in, in conversing with Claude, you know, you're, you're kind of talking to a, a distilled version of the totality of, you know, scientific knowledge, right? Um, and at the time it was imperfect, but it's rapidly getting better.
- JCJonah Cool
There, there's always this, 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, um, you know, an, an imperfect but helpful answer is the sort of thing that we go to, you know, the, the most trusted colleagues, where they might say like, "Eh, 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. Um, and again, it, it's, uh, 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?
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah, totally. Totally. And I think the, the other area that really jumped out for me early on was, um, you know, th-this is relevant later in the translation phase, is in the, um, regulatory process, right? So I've spent a lot of time, um, writing regulatory submissions, going through those processes with FDA, and, um, you know, Claude is really capable there. And, um, I think there's a huge opportunity both on the industry side and on the FDA side to recognize that, um, we have these tools that can, you know, speed up the process on both sides and facilitate consistent standards across the board. Um, and, um, I, I'm, I'm, I'm really excited about pursuing that, and I know people-
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... um, you know, a-across this whole industry are as well.
- JCJonah Cool
Okay. So let, 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. Uh, so some of those ideas and intuitions I, I think we probably agree with. But I think in, 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 w-what the life sciences, what regulatory frameworks look like. You know, let's talk a little bit more about, you know, your experience, our collective experience as, as scientists and kind of like bringing some of that detailed knowledge to our partnerships, to our research efforts and, you know, what, what those moments have looked like for you in the past and, and how they're maybe like reading onto priorities or approaches.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah. I, I think this is, uh, 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 waltz into biology-
- 20:00 – 25:20
Making life sciences AI safer and more accessible with new products and partnerships
- JCJonah Cool
fluidity and start to break down walls in some of the parts that makes science hard.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
I, I totally agree. And the other thing I wanna 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 eat your vegetables of, you know, all of these practical tasks, right, that, that are really exciting, but, um, more sort of surface level. Um, I also wanna call out that we're seeing an increasing trend in, you know, the field focusing on these bio foundation models-
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... 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 bio models for-
- JCJonah Cool
Mm-hmm
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... maybe you don't. And maybe actually with, you know, really large, um, frontier-scale models like Claude, um, 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, to follow and, um, that we'll be pursuing pretty aggressively.
- JCJonah Cool
Yep.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Right? 'Cause I think, um, having these savant-like capabilities in these bio modalities is really powerful for these specific bio foundation models. But, um, to really make that accessible to people, um, you need to be able to interface it with lang- with language, right?
- JCJonah Cool
Mm-hmm.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
And so, uh, I wanted to, to call that out as one interesting-
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah, I mean, it's a-
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... feature.
- JCJonah Cool
It's a great point that, you know, as the, the field progresses here, and by field here, I mean both, you know, the field of AI, but also, like, many domains of the 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, in the biotech space that are kind of taking some of these tools, as well as large pharma partners. And, and the way that the different pieces come together, right? So bio foundation models, general intelligence models, specific data sets, you know, the, it's gonna be fascinating, right? And I, I think, um, a really exciting time, and maybe this also gets to the point of partnership, right? So starting to take those different pieces, um, 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, um, for you or kind of a philosophy of, like, building the, this ecosystem.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah. So the, the way that I think about it is we know what our North Star is. We want to, um, enable the amazing world that, that Dario writes about in "Machines of Loving Grace," um, in which, you know, R&D throughout the life sciences is accelerated by at least an order of magnitude. We, we wanna 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 gonna do ourselves, right? A lot on the model training side, some, some on the product side as well. Um, but other pieces, you know, it makes sense for us to just find the right partners and, um, and make sure that we're supporting as, as much as we can. Um, and so when I think about the different types of partners, there's really important ecosystem partners, right? Like, I would call out Benchling as one of those for us, where, um, you know, I think they, they have, you know, the majority of, of working, you know, bioscientists, um, are, are using Benchling as how they engage every day with kind of managing and writing their experiments and their data. Um, and so that's a really, you know, important one for us to, to lean into, and I think there's a lot of exciting things that, that we'll be able to share soon that we're working on together. So that's one type of a, a partner. Um, another type is a, a partner that, um, we want to, to work with in which they're using what we're building to actually do science in-
- JCJonah Cool
Right
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... you know, in a way that wasn't possible before, right? Whether it's doing more science per unit time, right, uh, g- getting more impactful results per unit time than they could otherwise, um, or making a, a type of discovery that, that wasn't possible before, right? And so there, um, you know, there's a few partnerships that, that we're pretty excited about. Uh, I think one that, that's worth mentioning is with the Arc Institute. And I know that you're, you're thinking a lot about this as well, so, um, would love to hear your thoughts.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah, I mean, I, I think the, you know, the, the affinity that we both had towards Anthropic because of the unique features of the models-You know, there's like deep thinking. I, I don't think it's an accident actually that so many scientists have gravitated towards using Claude just, you know, naturally. But then also Dario's vision, and I think the, 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, that's bold, it's ambitious, um, but also I think the more you think about it and the more you think about what holds science back, uh, 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, the student that is, uh, 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, um, at, you know, AI forward pharma companies like Lilly. And, you know, that, that fluidity and thinking about kind of that entire, um, partnership and that ecosystem, I think is that, that's the beneficial deployment. It's, it's all of science
- 25:20 – 28:50
Anthropic's AI for Science program
- JCJonah Cool
and, and achieving that. The, the thing that I'm really excited about, and maybe one feature, um, you didn't touch on, is our AI for science program, and this is really looking to put tools and Claude into the hands of scientists that have a bold idea or a big project, and they think that Claude can, you know, be useful to solving 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, and 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, I think we, 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, what their success is, their discovery, their acceleration, their time, and start to see where, where we're doing pretty well and, and maybe some areas where we just need to be doing a lot better.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
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 gonna solve independently. But the most important part is when we put it all back together-
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... and scientists are actually using these things. You know, how is it going and, and what are we doing, right? And so I think the AI for science program is, is critical for, for us to get that feedback and be closing the loop with, with people that are using these things every day in the lab. Um, and so I am super excited about that. One other point that, um, I think is really important to make that, um, you know, speaks to why Anthropic and, and why the experience of doing this within Anthropic is, is so exciting, it's such a perfect fit, is that, um, as we're talking about accelerating and enhancing capabilities, right? The, the other side of that is safety-
- JCJonah Cool
Mm-hmm
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... and the tremendous responsibility that, that we all have to making sure that we are improving the model's capabilities and releasing, you know, increasingly impactful products, um, in a way that is responsible and, and aligned with, um, our responsible scaling policy and best practices in the biosecurity community. Um, it's something I care deeply about. I've, I've worked in biosecurity for years and, um, I think that, you know, at, at most companies, right, there would be some tension between the impact and the commercial aims of making these, uh, models better in, in biology, right? And the safety and responsibility side of, um, you know, slowing down when we need to and making sure that, 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, 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. Um, 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, uh, making sure that developing really powerful AI goes well and, and is done safely and what needs to happen in the life sciences, right? And so, um, that's something that I'm personally really excited about, that, that I also think is a big part of who we are as a partner in this field.
- JCJonah Cool
Right. Yeah. It's an assumption, right? Like we, we, we have to do that. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to scientists. We owe it to the world to, to take those sorts of questions really seriously.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah.
- JCJonah Cool
Um, yeah, and I, I think the
- 28:50 – 31:00
Advancing science as a research organization
- JCJonah Cool
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, um, AI companies, you know, frontier labs, et cetera. But I think being a research organization allows us to engage with researchers, labs, other research organizations in a way that r-really creates kind of a shared sense of like ownership and goals and, and working together, right? Like we, we want to advance the technologies and see them put to, you know, the, the full purpose and, and power, um, and are, are really invested in, in seeing that forward.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah. I think, I think we're really lucky that, that that's the case and, um, 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.
- JCJonah Cool
Right.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Many by training, many by nature and disposition. Um, and, um, you know, I think that, that y-you can feel that sort of, y-you know, in all the, the work that we do and, um, it makes it, you know, so natural to just go out and get to work with other scientists and all these things.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Um, and some, 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, uh, driving the ship, and I think that means that we get to have a lot of fun.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah. But I, I think it also-- it's, it's a lot of fun, but also that appreciation for core questions like safety and, and understanding what the power is and also core, you know, questions about like what are the right problems to solveAnd, you know, an, an appreciation for what makes science hard, what slows science down. You know, if we need to make a hundred years of progress in ten, um, you know, what, what does that actually look like, right? And, um, you know, you can draw back the veil of, of science and, you know, there are some of those things of just understanding the literature, right? Like, you, 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 [chuckles] every day reading the literature. But like even then, you'd get through, you know, some small frac- tiny fraction of what was published or pre-printed at any given moment. So it's, it's just impossible to, [chuckles] to keep up, right? But Clau-Claude
- 31:00 – 35:05
Shaping the future of life sciences with Claude and Anthropic
- JCJonah Cool
can keep up.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah. Yep. Okay. So let, let's talk a little bit, um, maybe here at the end about, you know, the future of life science work. And, you know, we've talked about, um, bioinformatics and coding. We've talked about some, you know, clinical work and different work that has been like demonstrated by some, 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. Um, where, where, where do you go when you start to think about the, the future?
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah. So when we start to think about the future, um, you know, I think first, um, we need to make sure that, that Claude has all of the foundational knowledge that any scientist in, in the bio world would have, right? It's the things like understanding protein structural biology, right? And, um, uh, being able to look at a molecule from organic chemistry and understand its structure and function and things like that, right? And so once you establish that base, then I think there's some really exciting places that, that we can go after that, um, where, uh, one of the ones that I really like to, to, to talk about and that I think is critical is Claude actually learning to execute experiments in the lab.
- JCJonah Cool
Mm-hmm.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Right? Um, I think in order to get to this world where, where, you know, we're all going, um, 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, the tedious work of, of, of life in the lab. Um, 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, a-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? Uh, 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." Um, and so I think that's critical for closing the loop and, um, enabling that acceleration that we're talking about. And, um, the other thing that, that I think is a really important theme for our future research is in biology as, as with any domain in science, we have the opportunity to learn directly from real data from nature, right? Uh, and so on the one hand, we do a lot of model training and learning on annotations that are created by humans and other data sets that are either curated or created by humans, right? But, um, there is an opportunity here to really do sort of lab in the loop-
- JCJonah Cool
Mm-hmm
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
... um, uh, active learning from, um, high-throughput bio measurements. And the other reason why bio is such a good fit for that is, um, we really, you know, are every year on a, a scaling law of the number of experiments, right, per, per unit, um, that, that we can do, right, in terms of the throughput of, of these systems. So tho-those are two themes that I, 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. Um, the answer is to get the data from the lab.
- JCJonah Cool
Yeah. I, I think, um, this, this is a great theme, and, and the other thing that maybe I would point to is I think there's still this, this huge overhang, if you will, in terms of like current capabilities and use. And, and one of the things that, uh, sticks out to me is like starting to get Claude 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, um, you know, starts to have this very cohesive feel where Claude is that virtual assistant and that, that virtual scientist that is helping not answer our problem, but, you know, answer a scientist's-- 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, uh, pushing towards the frontier.
- EKEric Kauderer-Abrams
Yeah. Thank you, Jonah. This has been a lot of fun and, uh, we're just getting started.
- JCJonah Cool
We are. [outro music]
Episode duration: 35:06
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