Brian Pepin

Head of Product at Radical Numerics. Formerly Founder/CEO at Rune Labs, Neuro Lead at Verily.

[Eric Nguyen @exnx]

A few years ago, we were just a group of researchers chasing unconventional bets in AI.

That journey took us from new architectures like Hyena, to Evo and creating the field of generative genomics, to a much bigger realization.

We need AI that can understand biology as a whole. We started @RadicalNumerics to pursue that vision.

Here’s a conversation with my cofounders on how we got here, why we took the leap, and what we believe comes next.

[Brian Pepin @UnLtdBananas]

@WillManidis is it nukes, or railroads? can it really be both?

[Brian Pepin @UnLtdBananas]

the combination of lower sequencing costs and next gen biological AI is going to be extremely interesting for cfDNA based diagnostics 🧬

[Radical Numerics @RadicalNumerics]

1/ With Omnii Diagnostics, we asked whether a multimodal genome language model could help find cancers whose signals in blood are too faint for current classifiers.

We adapted Omnii-1 to a biomarker never seen in pretraining. In a test cohort, Omnii's features improved early-stage cancer detection

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

Details of the phage therapy for antimicrobial resistance
@RadicalNumerics (from their website)
https://t.co/ejRe5ONzbc

[Brian Pepin @UnLtdBananas]

as we have seen with the big LLMs, with scale + architecture + training generalist models outperform specialized models *even on the task these models specialize on". True for coding...math...and increasingly true in bio 🧬

[Radical Numerics @RadicalNumerics]

1/10 Introducing Omnii Genome, one of eight Advances built on Omnii-1.

A single generalist model now outperforms leading specialized models (AlphaGenome) in linking genetic changes to gene activity and mapping regulatory interactions.

These capabilities help make sense of the 98% of the human genome that doesn’t code for proteins

How Omnii-1 works:

[Radical Numerics @RadicalNumerics]

1/10 Introducing Omnii Genome, one of eight Advances built on Omnii-1.

A single generalist model now outperforms leading specialized models (AlphaGenome) in linking genetic changes to gene activity and mapping regulatory interactions.

These capabilities help make sense of the 98% of the human genome that doesn’t code for proteins

How Omnii-1 works:

[Brian Pepin @UnLtdBananas]

@RadicalNumerics this is why my token consumption is now primarily omnii-1 🧬

[Brian Pepin @UnLtdBananas]

@Noahpinion speaking from the "inside": very important to keep defensive capabilities at the frontier. in this case, we are trying to defend against antibiotic resistant superbugs - unfortunately a real and worsening threat

[Brian Pepin @UnLtdBananas]

@RyoYbioinfo @RadicalNumerics stay tuned!

[Gordon Ritter @gordonritter]

For sixty years, we could only read the code of life. Now @RadicalNumerics has used AI to design a phage for a patient’s drug-resistant infection in weeks. Congratulations, @exnx and team on the launch of Omnii-1.

[Jeff Huber 🇺🇸 @jhuber]

Omnii-1: a leap toward General Biological Intelligence...

[Aniketh Iyengar @aniketh_iyengar]

At a time when many seek real impact from AI, I'm excited by our team's progress! Moving beyond in-silico benchmarks to practical biology and clinical applications is a major leap. With Omnii-1, we're already seeing strong performance w/ minimal tuning. Excited for what's next!

[Ben Siranosian @BenSiranosian]

We built Omnii-1 from the ground up with generative multimodal capabilities. Omnii-1 designed phages are being used to treat antibiotic resistant bacterial infections today, and this is just the beginning.

More at https://t.co/dS7AHbCrE3 - diagnostics, genetics, rare earths!

[Radical Numerics @RadicalNumerics]

Launching Omnii-1, our most powerful genome language model yet.

[Gautam "Machi" Machiraju @gmachiraju]

Thrilled to share the news after a monumental team push! After pretraining Omnii-1 this summer, we're seeing strong performance across numerous application areas, with surprisingly minimal tuning. We're just getting started and I'm so excited to keep building with this team 🧬

[Armin W. Thomas @athmsx]

Omnii-1 is out.

We've learned a lot about what happens when you train a single model across biology rather than solving each problem separately.

Some of the more surprising results haven't made it into a blog post yet.

Incredibly proud of the team that built this!

[Anshul Kundaje @anshulkundaje]

Based on benchmark performance for regulatory genomics, E2G linking & variant effect prediction, this model looks SOTA. Not enough details to know exactly what its doing. Seems conceptually similar to Nona https://t.co/Hs3ZVotJpQ. Look forward to testing it when it is available.

[Brian Pepin @UnLtdBananas]

we are working on really cool stuff at Radical 🧬🧬 🧬

[Eric Nguyen @exnx]

Introducing Omnii-1, our most powerful genome language model, and a major step toward general biological intelligence

In a world first, Omnii-1 designed the first AI-generated bacteriophages to be administered to a human patient with an antibiotic-resistant infection under compassionate use

[Eric Nguyen @exnx]

Introducing Omnii-1, our most powerful genome language model, and a major step toward general biological intelligence

In a world first, Omnii-1 designed the first AI-generated bacteriophages to be administered to a human patient with an antibiotic-resistant infection under compassionate use