Anne Marie Droste

Co-Founder at Tacit Labs

Evals & hocus pocus

[Michaela Hinks @MichaelaThinks]

Unironically, it is so good that biology is cool now. Everyone should be rooting for AI to cure all disease. Stop speculating about whether it will or will not happen and ask yourself what you personally can do to make it happen. Then do it

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

frontier models, with lots of test time compute, are becoming the engine of scientific discovery

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

This is in context of people thinking that AI just needs 'more data' in bio, rather than appreciating that basically nothing that we measure in bio is the actual thing we're trying to measure (eg RNAseq actually measuring how much gene is 'on' vs being a relative average full of technical artefacts)

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

Is anyone working on improving the *assays* using some sort of self-learning strategy in bio? Would love to talk.

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

@Seatownhorse I thought AI had solved bio?

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

@BabuuDx @BioMedsAI Yeah just v v excited about the idea of having non-proxy measurements yano

[Nicole Fitzgerald @ninklefitz]

in April, we published a launch essay for @tacitlabsco
that outlined a thesis for frontier AI research in biology -

1. if we want models to be useful for curing disease, we must evaluate them on tasks with roughly that shape and complexity. optimize directly on the thing you care about - i.e. discovering & developing a drug

2. we should aim to model the biotech (process, reasoning, decision-making), rather than the underlying biology. biology is an empirical science - develop better empirical methods rather than treating it as an analytical domain

3. the most difficult part of all of this will be verification of those empirical methods with signal that actually matters (does the proposed drug actually work in a human?). biological time is a tough wall to run up against (most expensive forward-pass of all time). figuring out how to turn scientific problems into learning problems is a first-class research problem

4. if we believe (1) and (2), and we do a bunch of good work and figure out some clever solutions to (3) then we unlock increasingly agentic discovery/development, with the logical extreme being this concept of the "zero-person biotech", which is now (somehow) percolating in mainstream discourse

5. (4) has extremely exciting implications for the overall economics and practicalities of how we develop novel therapeutics (broadening viable aperture to rare disease, n-of-1 trials; new mechanisms of distribution) all of which are net positive for the world. much to be optimistic on here

discovering and developing a drug is one of the most complex and long-horizon tasks in the broad spectrum of human endeavors. inarguably one of the most important and high-impact research directions in AI today

[Golden State Valkyries @valkyries]

GOLDEN STATE. GOLD STANDARD.

Your 2026 @WNBA Champions, the Golden State Valkyries. 🗣️

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

@thomasrorystone Possibly? I think in bio there's an exciting version of that world where *you* (or some simulation of you) are the eval, and we make N=1 drugs just for you.

We've got a long, long road ahead of us before we get anywhere like that in bio though.

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

From Ant's S-1:

Yes you should probably join Tacit Labs and shape the evals that all this money and compute are racing towards

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

Millions of zero person biotechs - let's go

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

Sam Altman's one-person company prediction is coming true. Anthropic just bought one. The founder of Mithril Medicine used Claude to take a muscular dystrophy antibody treatment from concept to proof-of-principle in mice in 18 months, with just himself, Claude, and part-time consultants. The technical report is great. I will quote:

'The week opened with the handover of two cell-based assays, cell adhesion and flow cytometry, within our team, while eleven questions remained open with the assay CRO. In two sentences, one of us asked Claude to review the latest emails between the outgoing assay lead and the assay CRO and to recommend next steps for the handover, and gave it the link to the handover folder. Claude returned a bottom line after 96s and a full plan with five drafted emails after 18 min. For the full plan it read six email threads, the handover folder, two slide decks and two reports, all in the mailbox and file store to which we had given it access. Four working days later, nine of the eleven questions had an answer in writing and the other two had been left to pilot experiments. The adhesion screen was thereby set out in writing. The CRO drew the plate map to the format that our team had requested, Claude compiled the run order and the material calculation from the production data, and one of us reviewed and approved them.

On day 4, the production CRO delivered its data package, a report of 341 pages, which one of us forwarded to Claude in two sentences, with the request to review it, share observations and recommend next steps. Claude returned a bottom line after 2 min 40s and, once it had read every page, a visual synthesis of all 113 constructs after 7 min 53s. The synthesis arranged the constructs on the grid of 14 by 8 arms. Claude marked 82 constructs for screening as is, seven for additional polishing, and the 24 constructs of three laminin-binding arms to be held back from the cell-based assays on production criteria. Each of the 113 constructs thus had a proposed next step in less than 8 min.

Claude had recommended binding kinetics for all 113 con-structs, and on day 7 one of us challenged this plan. Claude defended it within 27s, arguing that affinity would show whether the three arms merit further work. One of us overruled this recommendation and set the three arms aside on production criteria. Their material remains in storage. Four minutes later, Claude had revised its memo, the working page, the run order and three unsent drafts from 113 to 89 constructs. It had also applied the ruling to three dependent steps in the unsent drafts, each flagged for our veto. The exchange took 7 min 36s from challenge to new plan, and every affected email was still an unsent draft. After the ruling, eight emails drafted by Claude went out on the same day to three CROs and a consultant.

Over the whole week, Claude drafted 17 emails, each in answer to a request from one of us, and we sent 12 of them, each after editing. With its drafts, Claude listed 41 points, such as tube fills, shipping conditions, recipients and assay settings, for which it had found no written statement of ours, so that we could confirm, change or strike each before sending. We kept some, struck others and changed one. Among the passages that we kept were proposals for controls. One draft proposed a comparison of polished and unpolished material on one sensor chip, to size the error that impurities cause in the rest of the panel. Another requested a buffer control diluted like the most dilute sample, so that any effect of the buffer appears at its largest. These proposals concerned the measurement of constructs that had already been produced, and each reached a CRO only after one of us had reviewed and approved it.

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

@maxisawesome538 Slash coldest

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

Turns out I really like the Tacit team

[Ian Quigley @allmeasures]

Many thanks to @latentspacepod for a delightful conversation! We got into all sorts of hijinks.

https://t.co/pFTY42jwNF

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

@navvye @tylerarose0 @shaurya_sinha7 Cool!

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

@Ben_Reinhardt This is so cool!

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

@rgrchen @A_Cembellin_Pri @amlakhan Aw you will like each other

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

@sienna_rothery What?? Sightglass, Hedge, Golden Goat, Paper Son

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

The most important thing we can apply AI to is improving medicine and human health - very excited about this partnership with the CZI and the Virtual Biology Initiative!

[Anne Marie Droste @AmDroste]

Just, truly insane timeline we live in. In awe and weirdly sad? And very in awe.

[Sam Altman @sama]

We are entering a new era of discovery now:

https://t.co/Ng8GquwN3r