Founders @AmDroste and @ninklefitz launch Tacit Labs to apply machine learning to biology

we @every make investments every so often in founders building things in AI who we think are excellent

@ninklefitz is one of those founders—and i am also a huge fan of tacit's mission and approach

I've started a new company called @tacitlabsco, an applied research lab at the intersection of AI and biology. 1/n

Today, we announce our collaboration with @OpenAI on LifeSciBench, a first of its kind multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate model capabilities in the life sciences.

You can read more about our work at our website: https://www.tacitlabs.co/introducing-tacit-labs

AI progress is determined by how fast and abundant your feedback loops are. Biotech’s verifier is the clinical trial, but getting there takes 10 years and >$1B. Faster, denser feedback for large-scale agentic systems is the greatest bottleneck in training and meaningfully deploying models in biopharma.

We are starting with long-horizon evaluations across the drug discovery and development pipeline to understand exactly when and where agentic systems fail.

We're lucky to work with an A-team of wonderful early investors - @alanaagoyal at Basecase, @tmrohan at Otherwise, @dreidco at Zetta, , @jefrankle, @Thom_Wolf , @Ronalfa, @jackdent, @danshipper, the og @wbuchw, and many others. 9/n

Proud angel and intern manager!

Tacit is starting by building realistic, long-horizon evaluations that test whether AI systems can make linked decisions across drug discovery and development. These evals combine human reasoning and task design with well-calibrated tools (bio FMs, raw bio readouts, and easy-to-access lab infrastructure). 4/n

@every @ninklefitz i wrote "against explanations" in 2023 about how AI might change the sciences...extremely pumped to see the prospect of so much progress so fast

https://every.to/chain-of-thought/against-explanations

In the limit, drug development will be a function of compute. We are building for a future of abundance; thousands of new biotechs will pursue millions of therapeutic hypothesis in parallel.

Our team has trained frontier language models and taken drugs to the clinic. We are actively hiring researchers and scientists. Come join us.

Link to website: http://www.tacitlabs.co Preprint: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/b4299379-0a97-4ffa-8b9b-c3fbb299caa9/lifescibench_preprint.pdf

Understanding and intervening on human biology is one of the most high-value, high-leverage we can do we with AI, but we are bottlenecked by the lack of feedback systems that correlate with what actually matters - the discovery of drugs with positive outcomes in humans. 3/n

@tacitlabsco extremely honored to be sit beside to @ninklefitz @AmDroste and @KR_Skelly everyday. their thinking and knowledge in the space is truly humbling. the only thing i have on them is twitter followers so yall can't let me lose my one advantage here

Language models have entirely reconfigured the way we work, especially in domains like coding and mathematics, where rewards are well-defined and verification is fast, abundant, and information-dense. 2/n

Drug development will not be transformed by isolated capability gains. It will be transformed by composing atomic tasks into a decision loop that makes better choices along the chain of decisions that lead to a drug.

We work with frontier labs, agentic scientist cos, and biopharma to build increasingly long and more realistic drug development loops. Over time, these loops converge to the inference-time infrastructure required to run autonomous drug discovery at scale.

Above all, so excited to co-found Tacit with @AmDroste, and work alongside @maxisawesome538 and @KR_Skelly. This is a uniquely shaped team of incredible people who have trained frontier language models, designed and scaled experimental platforms, and brought drugs to the clinic. 8/n

There has never been a more exciting time at this intersection - every day we are seeing major advancements across the entire ecosystem. It is my belief that in the limit, these forces will compress drug development to a function of compute. 5/n

There is a long, exciting road ahead of us, and we are just getting started. We are looking for ambitious, creative people that believe in this vision and are hiring for a number of positions across research, engineering, and operations. 7/n

As such, the future of drug development will look radically different - model-centric, massively parallelized, and increasingly autonomous. In the long term, Tacit aims to build enabling infrastructure for this new way of developing drugs. 6/n

@maxisawesome538 @tacitlabsco Awesome stuff Max

@maxisawesome538 @tacitlabsco Congrats Max that’s awesome!