Jack Dent, co-founder of Chai Discovery, gives us a look at how AI could change the way we discover drugs, understand biology, and treat disease. Jack went from cold-emailing Stripe and joining as a teenager to co-founding Chai Discovery, the AI drug design company Sam Altman asked him and Josh to start years before they did. Chai has since raised $225M from investors including OpenAI and Thrive Capital, and built a model that hit a drug-design breakthrough far faster than expected, with roughly 200x better antibody success rates.We talk about whether people could one day help cure their own diseases with AI, whether each of us might have a personalized biology model, and whether medicine shifts from treating sickness to preventing it before it starts. Jack also gets into whether frontier AI labs will build these biology models themselves, what AI can and can’t fix in our current healthcare system, why clinical trials are still such a bottleneck, and how much of science may become less random when AI can generate and test better hypotheses.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro

02:28 Inside Stripe When It Was Only 100 People

08:45 How Sam Altman Sparked Chai’s Origin Story

10:52 Why Chai Discovery Exists

16:20 The Chai-2 Antibody Breakthrough

19:24 Approaching Biology as Engineering

24:45 Using AI to treat ourselves26:52 Robotics in labs

27:22 Why Pharma Is Finally Moving on AI

29:49 Can AI Fix Clinical Trials?

32:53 Personalized biology models

36:24 Longevity, Peptides, and Trillion-Dollar Drugs

39:02 Does it matter that the government cuts exploratory science grants?

41:00 What Next-Gen Chai Models Will Do

42:08 Will Frontier AI Labs Build Biology Models?

43:26 Biology is hard