Ayan

PhD in Synbio, Entrepreneur, Open Science, Researching and Writing About Futures and Frontiers

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

My first piece for the @AmplifyPartners Writing Fellowship is out: The Fertility of an Idea

It traces the lineage of optogenetics and argues that great science grows the way living things do, across time, people, instruments, branching and borrowing, and that this should shape how we build AI for science.

I’m grateful to @dbeyer123, @madelynheart_ and @ElliotHershberg at Amplify for their time and support along the way, and a very big thank you to the inimitable @barsisyphus who edited the piece with lots of care.

[sisyphus bar and grill @barsisyphus]

The birth of optogenetics, whose pioneers won the Nobel Prize this year (!), is interesting because it developed almost randomly.

The history of this field (from @ayanobacter) can help us truly understand discovery...and train better AI for science.

https://t.co/o9CRLWAOO4

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

Ms. Frizzle inspired a generation of scientists and we don’t talk about that enough

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

@klingefjord you better hope the french don't find this here tweet 👀...

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

@barsisyphus @iamwaynechi

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

@barsisyphus @iamwaynechi unfort your japan trip is bringing out the worst in us

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

I've been experimenting again with science video content

here's a little throwback to a video I made in 2024

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

glow in the dark houseplants are here!!

(& so are ayan synbio vids 🧬 …)

[sachin @sachinnbenny]

Management is an interface into which we’ve built increasingly expressive forms of intelligence. Hierarchies, standards, and APIs encode ways to coordinate work but are kind of dumb computationally. AI adds more expressiveness to this interface

[sisyphus bar and grill @barsisyphus]

Really good writing from @sachinnbenny about AI's impact on how we organize firms.

Why are decreased AI-driven transaction costs not impacting firms as we might expect them to?

https://t.co/B116cIqaV6

[ruby justice thelot @being_on_line]

showing up swagged out is an act of resistance

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

there must be a predictable bubble economics trajectory (BET if you will) where eventually certain tracks saturate/returns aren’t hitting as hard and people start casting a wider more speculative net before it pops, then the next bubble gets fueled by some of those late stage exploratory investment survivors

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

Me yesterday: Everyone loves to use biology as their “AI solves everything” use case…and yet it has, I would argue the least investment in speculative, deep future oriented research/invention -- I think there’s actually lots of hidden creativity, we just need to give more interesting people money and a platform

David Lang literally today: We're giving more interesting people money and a platform to catalyze paradigm shifting science

(one might call this divine timing)

[David Lang @davidtlang]

BIG NEWS!

For the past few years, we've given scientists budgets so they can fund their peers with small, fast grants. Today, we're going bigger.

We're opening up a call to find and fund emerging "field builders"—people with the ambition and curiosity to kickstart a new field of science and technology. You'll get a budget of $70,000 to regrant (up to $10,000) out to projects and ideas and join a community of explorers.

Do you have an idea for a new field of science that *should* exist? Please apply!

[David Lang @davidtlang]

BIG NEWS!

For the past few years, we've given scientists budgets so they can fund their peers with small, fast grants. Today, we're going bigger.

We're opening up a call to find and fund emerging "field builders"—people with the ambition and curiosity to kickstart a new field of science and technology. You'll get a budget of $70,000 to regrant (up to $10,000) out to projects and ideas and join a community of explorers.

Do you have an idea for a new field of science that *should* exist? Please apply!

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

@cyrusclarke Approbatum

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

@jboysen0 Manifesting secret option 3 🙏🏽

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

Everyone loves to use biology as their “AI solves everything” use case…and yet it has, I would argue the least investment in speculative, deep future oriented research/invention

So much possibility, clearly major ambitions publicly being stated, and seemingly so little imagination

I think there’s actually lots of hidden creativity, we just need to give more interesting people money and a platform

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION DETECTED: Tencent’s chief AI scientist and former OpenAI researcher Shunyu Yao said that AI models will soon be powerful enough to master biology, and that Tencent plans to build AI science labs that will operate completely autonomously, per SCMP.

[vas @vasuman]

It’s not just NVIDIA. Sources confirm Google's Gemini team was also leaking confidential information to China.

China is reportedly asking them to stop.

[Ayan @ayanobacter]

@cyrusclarke I wonder who thought of that 👀

[Steeve Morin @steeve]

the Jensen scandal wouldn't work in France