$GOOGL has an anti-aging asset nobody is pricing.
Friedberg @friedberg walked through a Calico paper that should be on Alphabet holders' radar. Calico is Google's longevity lab. Working with Revel Pharma, it used AlphaFold plus directed evolution to design a novel enzyme that degrades CML, the glycation end-product that stiffens tissue and drives aging.
The result is not a slide. Across five recursive design cycles the enzyme degraded **52-97%** of CML on human proteins, and on donated skin from patients over 70 it eliminated about **55%** of CML - reversing the skin's profile toward that of a 31-year-old. It is AI-designed proteins doing something genuinely new in biology, not a benchmark score. Chamath @chamath frames the first market as cosmetic: a workable anti-aging cream is a multi-trillion-dollar category.
This is the AlphaFold thesis paying out in a product line, and the AlphaFold-to-drugs bridge is exactly what Demis Hassabis @demishassabis has argued is the real near-term return on Google's AI - not chatbots, but designed molecules. Same company, same stack, a second revenue engine the market files under "research."
Implication: this is deep-optionality inside a name you already hold on search and cloud. It does not move the $GOOGL model this year. But it is a reminder that Alphabet's AI edge shows up in drug and materials design, an option the Street assigns roughly zero value. If a Calico or Isomorphic asset reaches a real market, that is upside no analyst is underwriting.
Watch for Calico or Isomorphic Labs to move a designed molecule toward a commercial or clinical path.
Brad Gerstner: Companies Will Pay 5x More for the Best AI, No Evidence of Pricing Pressure from Open Source
@altcap:
“Jason, you talked about summarizing a document, it may take 20,000 cheap tokens to do. Of course, shoot that to a lagging model or an open source model.
But if you're talking about replacing a software engineer for two hours, that may take two million expensive tokens, and the consequence of using something that's 95% as good is really high.
Because you have a long-running task, and if the task breaks early, or it breaks in the middle, or it breaks at the end, there's a huge cost to that.”
@Jason:
“You still burn the tokens, right? And back to this analogy I was using, you're pulling the slot machine, and you lose.”
Brad:
“And (you lose) the time and the compute.
So if an AI agent is replacing a $200 an hour consultant, right? Take that as an example.
So three consulting firms, they're competing. They need the smartest consultant. They're charging $200 an hour.
The difference between spending $3 on a cheap model or $15 on an expensive model to replace a $200/hour consultant, it's just irrelevant.
That inference cost difference is irrelevant if you're getting something that's bulletproof for $15, and so I think that's what we're seeing play out.
The best evidence for all of this is just revenue growth. I'm talking about, what is Anthropic's revenue growth compared to OpenAI, compared to the open source models? Millions of independent actors are choosing every single day.
The open source companies are growing, right? But they're growing selling something that is really, really cheap.
And there's room in every single market for premium products, for mid-tier products, and for commodity products, and I think we see a lot of this token growth, people are speculating that the intelligence gap between that commodity stuff and the frontier stuff is going to collapse to the point that people won't pay for the frontier stuff.
There is no evidence of that on the field today.”
Linking the past to the present ✨
McLaren reveal their special livery for the British Grand Prix, taking inspiration from the team's first-ever Formula 1 car, the McLaren M2B 🤩
#F1#BritishGP
At AIPCon 10, Palantir CEO Alex Karp shares our secret to sales:
“We’re hoping that you’ll go to a large language model company and learn that they don’t care about you at all.”
“What you will find is there are a myriad of problems that these very important models solve, and there are even bigger problems that they create.”
“We’re in the business of giving you the ability to solve those problems for yourself and own the means of production.”
Incredible…. The 2% of people using these tools are experiencing AGI, and the other 98% belief AI is a ChatGPT 3.5 result filled with hallucinations
One month is seven months of progress right now
There is no precedent for what we are experiencing
Heading back to Stanford next Monday to talk with the AI Club about building real companies in this new era.
If you're a strong software engineer who wants to ship high-quality enterprise software at a completely different pace, we’re hiring at @8090Solutions right now. Please, come and say hi after the talk!