Jacob Trefethen

Alzheimer’s is one of medicine's hardest unsolved problems, and one of the most devastating. At the OpenAI Foundation, we believe AI is well suited to its complexity. We're directing over $100M to scientists mapping the disease, designing drugs, & more. I wrote about it here: openaifoundation.org/news/ai-for-al…

Speedrunning the civilizational tech tree with AI for Science Great study by Conor Griffin, Don Wallace, and Theo Brown of Google DeepMind making the case for “AI data stocktakes” - identifying the areas where the availability of data would accelerate progress in AI for science. This case study explores opportunities to do for fusion what the Protein Data Bank did for protein structure prediction and protein design. bit.ly/3QHrM7w A few thoughts · If we want to speed run the civilizational tech tree, we should be doing this in more areas of science and engineering. For example, Woody Sherman, Conor Coley et. al. identified 22 opportunities to use AI to accelerate small molecule drug discovery, if only we had the right data. bit.ly/4238mwm · White paper competitions are a low-cost way to identify these ideas. @RenPhilanthropy organized a white paper competition for the UK Government which surfaced great ideas in fusion, engineering biology, biomedical research, advanced materials, and quantum technology. The value of white paper competitions is that they unbundle idea generation from execution. A researcher may recognize the value of a dataset, but may not be in a position to create or liberate it. · In addition to data, AI for Science requires complementary investments in benchmarks, RL environments, compute, self-driving labs, formalization, tools for high-throughput experimentation, tools for inverse design, and porting numerical simulations written in Fortran to more modern languages such as Jax and Julia. We also need more people and teams who are bilingual, with both domain and computational expertise. · One question about the datasets. When and under what circumstances should they be public goods, club goods, or private goods? Please get in touch if you’d like to work with Renaissance Philanthropy on this! @sebkrier

Congratulations to @notanastronomer for launching this new magazine. Subscribed! I enjoyed this first piece from @PaulFNiehaus for its range across practical and philosophical issues. E.g. I liked this example highlighting the limits of narrow cost-effectiveness analysis:

@eric_is_weird @salonium It is quite possible that was me (overwhelmed with pride), but I don’t actually recall (blinded by excitement). And Saloni’s fan club extends to places none of us can quantify…

@salonium @JacobTref .@JacobTref was it you that gave the really prominent cheer/yell as Saloni walked out?! Or does Saloni have a whole fan club in Vancouver? Or I guess it could totally be both.

Took a few pictures for the Hard Drugs fans among you!

Read: press.asimov.com/articles/strep

@keithwynroe @Miles_Brundage @FoundationOAI nope!

@JacobTref @Miles_Brundage @FoundationOAI can you follow me back on it

Is @FoundationOAI the real account

We expect to add to these approaches over the course of 2026 and beyond, as we get further feedback from the research community, so that together we can figure out how to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s. By tackling Alzheimer’s head-on, we aim not only to help change the course of this disease, but also to build tools and knowledge that can accelerate progress against many others. Onwards! openaifoundation.org/news/ai-for-al…

From the beginning, we have been guided in our strategy by experts at @UCSF, whose clinical and scientific experience will be a necessary component to our ability to succeed. We are excited to keep exploring collaborations with some of the world's best scientists, right here in San Francisco. 🌉💙

Why focus on Alzheimer's? It's a terrible disease, it is getting worse as populations age, and the complexity of the disease is a good fit for AI. Alzheimer’s affects not only the millions of people diagnosed, but their spouses, children, and other caregivers who support them. The disease places immense emotional and financial strain on families. Modern medicine has made more of a dent elsewhere... 🧵

We are really grateful to work with OpenAI Foundation to advance @arcinstitute's Alzheimer's initiative! We designed Arc in part to tackle Alzheimer's, since it's the archetypal complex disease. Our goal is to model and understand how genes and environment shape risk a complex disease like Alzheimer's, and how we can use that knowledge to prevent it. We are combining functional genomics, multi-cell type human models and causal machine learning approaches to understand and reverse core Alzheimer's Disease risk phenotypes. We have a lot of work ahead of us! If you want to join us, please reach out: arcinstitute.org/jobs

Congrats to the OAI Foundation team and @JacobTref for more than $100 million in grants across six research institutions just this month, as a first step to support and accelerate Alzheimer’s research!! openaifoundation.org/news/ai-for-al…

OpenAI Foundation is taking an end-to-end approach to tackling Alzheimer's with AI. We're supporting the full spectrum of work — from early diagnosis and better understanding of the disease, to accelerating new drug discovery. This month, we're finalizing over $100M in grants across six institutions to advance this comprehensive effort. openaifoundation.org/news/ai-for-al…

@eamcvey @EvEBiotech 📉🤝

Tackling hard problems is energizing, especially with a great set of partners! I'm excited to be part of this via @EvEBiotech where we're generating data that models can learn from. For everyone who is or will be impacted by Alzheimer's...let's make this line go down!!