AI Startups

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Three of the most valuable AI researchers in the world just left their $500K-plus jobs to build in an industry where you can’t ship a product without a decade of regulatory approval. That’s not a career mistake — it’s a signal. Miles Wang left OpenAI to launch a drug discovery startup at a $2 billion valuation. Anthropic is developing drugs directly with Claude Science. Google DeepMind spinout Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1 billion. Chai Discovery hit a $3.8 billion valuation. This isn’t a trend — it’s a coordinated migration of AI talent into the most locked-down industries on the planet. And if you’re a solo builder, the implications go way beyond biotech. I covered Wang’s original move when the news broke, but the bigger picture is what matters here. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Miles Wang, a researcher at OpenAI who dropped out of Harvard to work on AI-powered biological discovery, is reportedly in talks to launch his own startup — at a $2 billion valuation. Lightspeed Venture Partners is considering leading a $200 million round. And several other OpenAI researchers are expected to follow him out the door. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Miles Wang, a former OpenAI researcher, is in talks to launch an AI drug discovery startup valued at $2 billion. His core strategy isn’t inventing new compounds from scratch; it’s identifying new therapeutic uses for drugs that have already passed safety trials but failed for their original purpose. The expensive, time-consuming part—proving a compound is safe for humans—is already done. Wang’s company, using transformer architectures similar to those behind ChatGPT, focuses on finding the right match between an existing molecule and a new disease. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Let’s cut through the noise about OpenAI’s talent exodus. We’re watching some of the world’s best AI researchers leave general-purpose labs for highly specific industries like drug discovery. If you’re a solo builder working with no-code tools, this sounds irrelevant — but it’s actually the most important signal for the future of your workflow. The tools you’ll be using in 18 months will be radically different because of this shift. ...