Jasmin Kaur

Building something new. Prev: led AI/ML + hardware at GSK; mapped brain architectures; Director of clinical trials acceleration

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

Hosting this panel was the perfect excuse to bring together @shelbynewsad and @RuxandraTeslo, two writers whose thinking on the future of biotech I admire.

And get the people shaping this ecosystem all in one room. It was a blast.

[Vega Shah @dr_alphalyrae]

Faster feedback loops in Bio - @shelbynewsad and @RuxandraTeslo talk about getting human data faster, navigating fda approval and various other emerging techbio trends at #JPM26

Hosted by @JasminKaur_ of @tacitmachines

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

Japanese coffee roast; Soaking in art; Back into my craft

It’s going to be a good summer for scientific frontiers

[Gurpriya @GurpriyaSidhu]

Joan Didion's essay on self-respect should not only be a mandatory read for women but should be read at least once every year with extreme attention.

[Angelica Parente @draparente]

Back in SF for Deep Tech week , doing a fireside chat with @matisere tomorrow along with a crazy lineup of talks from @SumnerLN (@merge), @dileeplearning (@AsteraInstitute), Alan Mardinly (@ScienceCorp_), and @JohanWinn (@E11BIO) at Frontiers of Neuro.

RSVP at the link below.

[Charlie Petty @incredutility]

I joined @Stripe in January to build a new philanthropic initiative with @nanransohoff. Today we’re announcing Intercept, a $500m innovation fund focused on radically reducing the burden of respiratory viruses.

I’ve spent the past decade investing in vaccines and drugs for infectious disease, and this is the most exciting thing I’ve ever been a part of. Thrilled to be working with @Stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI, @coeff_giving and individuals from Jane Street.

We've raised the capital and now it’s time to get to work.

[Nan Ransohoff @nanransohoff]

Today we're launching Intercept: a $500M philanthropic initiative to make respiratory infections, like the common cold and flu, a thing of the past.

We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case. Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics.

So, if they’re such a big problem, why haven’t we dealt with them yet? Last year we convened ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech investors, and regulatory experts to better understand that.

We heard two main reasons:
(1) First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs make this newly possible.
(2) Second is a lack of funding: broad-spectrum solutions have historically been underfunded, in part because they’re not a great fit for most philanthropic or commercial funding (and while COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn't been sustained).

We think that with enough focus and funding, this might be solvable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of new tools to catalyze the development and deployment of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies.

This problem is undoubtedly difficult. But it’s more tractable now than it’s ever been. We think we should give it our best shot.

We’re enormously grateful to our anchor funders: @stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI and individuals from Jane Street.

And, I’m very excited to be building this with @incredutility and the rest of the team.

[Michael Dempsey @mhdempsey]

I've met many (often younger) people in tech recently who, while discussing their careers, reference their opportunity cost as to why they feel the need to rush into their next thing.

I am in some ways reminded of a conversation I had with my first boss who, after hearing how I thought about the next 5 years of my life, smiled and said "i hope you get what you want, but you know, you have all these plans for life and then it just kind of beats you down and you learn to enjoy survival."

And in many instances, I get it. This moment in time feels unique. A life you've imagined, in a future that feels inevitable and out of your control, feels like it could slip away at any point and you'll miss it and forever wonder about the sliding door you didn't walk through and the moments of what could have been while everyone around you does better than you.

Because all around you are examples of other people in your cohort who are "killing it" and why should you not be one of them? And why is that data point you have not as good a proof point as ever that you should do the thing as you see fit right now?

And how could one in the face of all of this absolute uncertainty and also total certainty possibly make the choice to wait, to let whatever feeling you've been sitting on, simmer and just be in the months or years between when you *think* time is slipping away and when it is actually slipping away.

Perhaps one could say a cliche like "life is long" and that to cite opportunity cost and measure it at the age of 20-something and on a time horizon that is 12-24 months feels off.

Perhaps one could say that to not know what you want your life's work to be at the age of 20-something (or even 30-something) is also okay.

Perhaps one could say that time doesn't really slip away if you truly approach your professional life as a craft for a long time.

At some point in the conversation, I often then hear about how people are quite certain that this is the most important thing for them to do or that it is eventually what they will want to do no matter what.

And I then repeat the point that if it is your life's work, why would you be in a hurry?

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

@AlecStapp its the skincare facemasks that everyone want their hands on

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

"the goal should be to make the U.S. the best place to generate decision-grade FiH data, not just the fastest place to dose the first patient"

Places like US have a lot of clinical and research strengths to double down on; not enough people are talking about it

[Patrick Malone, MD PhD @patricksmalone]

china’s advantage in early clinical development is structural, not simply a byproduct of U.S. inefficiency: scale, cost, centralized hospitals, speed, and an ecosystem designed to quickly generate human data. encouraging to see FDA’s new Expedited IND pilot respond structurally too, with a network of qualified research institutions to support first-in-human trials.

process reforms are helpful (eg FDA reviews on rolling basis, IRB review and site activation run in parallel instead of in sequence), but the bigger opportunity is the clinical dev infra. we aren't going to beat china on scale and cost, but we should compete on other vectors such such as clinical depth, specialist expertise, trusted data / lower-variance execution, etc.

the goal should be to make the U.S. the best place to generate decision-grade FiH data, not just the fastest place to dose the first patient.

FDA is asking for feedback. if you care about U.S. biotech competitiveness, weigh in.

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

@notanastronomer @RuxandraTeslo ya ya ping me

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

Heavy +1

[Nathan Benaich @nathanbenaich]

Europe cannot rent its way to AI sovereignty.

TLDR, here's my take I shared with frontier AI lab leadership this week. When Washington can disable a model overnight, the question is not whether AI is safe but who controls it:

A week ago the United States government ordered Anthropic, the world's most valuable AI startup, to shut off its most capable model, Fable, for every foreign national on earth - whether they worked for Anthropic or not. This was not an export ban on a weapon sold to an adversary. It was an instruction to disable a commercial product, four days after its release, after officials acted on a claim - which Anthropic disputed as narrow and unproven - that its safeguards could be jailbroken to expose cyber-offense capabilities.

I have spent my career around this technology, first as a graduate student and for the past decade as an investor @airstreet. In that time I have watched AI move from recommending movies to driving cars, speaking with a human voice, and editing the genome. I have also watched the debate about its risks settle on only half the question.

That debate is mostly about capability: how powerful these systems are becoming, and whether one might escape human control. Those are real questions. But they are not the only ones, and the Anthropic episode exposed the half we have neglected: access and control. The most advanced AI is built by a handful of American companies, on American soil, under American law, and what the rest of us are allowed to do with it can change on a Friday afternoon. The risk that matters today is not only that AI goes rogue, but that we do not control access to it at all.

Consider what "renting intelligence" now means in practice. A European hospital triaging scans, a bank screening fraud, a defense ministry planning for a conflict: increasingly each runs on an American AI system that's governed by its export regime. A single directive in Washington cascades, instantly, through every institution wired to that model. We have built core economic and public infrastructure on a supply that a foreign government can shut off. And while there are open-source alternatives, they're either Chinese or not at the frontier, and building European infrastructure on Chinese open weights trades one dependency for a thornier one.

And these systems are starting to improve themselves. As they do, AI stops being one industry among many and becomes the input to all the others - writing the code, running the research, designing the products, and, increasingly, generating the growth itself. Once intelligence is the engine of an economy, a country without a frontier model of its own does not lose a sector; it loses control of the inputs to everything else, and the independence that depends on them. Worse, the gap compounds: capability that improves itself gets harder to chase with every month it runs ahead. This is not a race Europe can plan to enter in a decade. The window to be a builder rather than a buyer is measured in the time it takes to stand up a cluster, not a career.

This should sting, because Europeans invented much of modern AI. DeepMind was founded in London and sold to Google in 2014, and a great deal of the talent that followed now lives in California. Today Europe faces a company worth almost $1 trillion and American tech giants spending an estimated $450 billion a year on AI infrastructure. Its answer has been the EU AI Act and a capital commitment that is a rounding error by comparison. A single American site, xAI's Colossus in Memphis, runs more than half a million GPUs. Europe has nothing remotely at that scale. The instinct to govern this technology is right, but we're off on the ambition by orders of magnitude.

It is fair to object that regulation is itself a form of power. But a rulebook is not a substitute for the thing it governs. You cannot regulate, or be cut off from, an industry you do not have.

Europe's instinct, when it is cut off, is not to build but to ask. We saw it within the week. The G7 convened in Evian and floated a "trusted partners" scheme to win back the access it had just lost, while Emmanuel Macron feted Donald Trump beneath the gilt of Versailles, the palace where France once helped midwife American independence. Two and a half centuries on, the dependency has reversed, and the posture is courtship.

None of this means Europe can match the American frontier dollar for dollar. With today's capital, it cannot, and pretending otherwise only wastes the little it has. But the goal is not parity, it is leverage. A country does not need the best model in the world to be sovereign; it needs a credible one of its own, on its own soil, good enough that being cut off is survivable rather than catastrophic. That is the difference between negotiating your access from dependence and negotiating it with an alternative in hand. The point is not to win the race. It is to make sure no one else can end it for you.

Sovereignty of that kind is something you build, and Europe has done it before. The Financial Conduct Authority's regulatory sandbox, launched in 2016, let startups test products with real customers under supervision instead of waiting years for authorization. The pro-innovation culture it signaled helped make London the fintech capital of Europe, home to Revolut, Wise, and Monzo. Government should be AI's most demanding early customer rather than writing rules for systems it has only ever imported.

Industry has to stop behaving like a tenant. Too many European companies rent the entire stack from American providers and build a thin product on top. That earns a margin and owns nothing: when the lab that supplies you decides to compete with you, or its government decides to cut you off, you have no ground to stand on. Where it counts, build and hold your own models and compute.

And our universities, which should be the source of all this, still work against it. I have argued here before that Europe's spinout system is broken, and it remains so. Too many institutions treat the companies their research creates as something to extract value from, rather than as the vehicle through which a discovery reaches the world. The best research should leave the building as a company, in addition to a paper.

We keep framing AI safety and AI ambition as a tradeoff, as though a country must choose between governing this technology and building it. It is not a choice. The safest position is not the most heavily regulated one. It is the one where the model runs on your terms, in your jurisdiction, and no one on the far side of an ocean can reach over and turn it off. Right now that finger is not ours. Until it is, every other conversation about AI risk is one we are having with someone else's permission.

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[Aseel Swaid @aseelswaid9]

Harvesting roses in Oman

[gabriel @gabriel1]

this took so long for me to understand: the bottleneck to more innovation is not more high intelligence people, but more people having an interest in hard problems

it's impossible to create new useful things if you don't get immense happiness from making that thing

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

@jeremybernier had the same experience with plenty of aesthetic cafes available to work from in China and Singapore

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

@notanastronomer @RuxandraTeslo actually a LOT competing in recruitment mimesis..too many if you ask me lol

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

Folks using LLMs to dilute their voice and expression in even comments and text messages is kind of insane.

you can't unsee this stuff

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

@LauraPGomez_ @LilaSciences congrats! we should chat re out of distribution scientific intelligence :)

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

@yuwen_lu_ @contralabs_ai would love to chat more re creativity frontier in models

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

@steventen nice! let's meet on Wed?

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

@emily_yu often meet people like this I really admire across art and tech. My brain always quotes 'still waters run deep'

[Jasmin Kaur @JasminKaur_]

Hanging out at Manifest has been my entire twitter actualised in person