Howard Salis
3.6K posts
@hsalis
Professor of synthetic biology & chemical engineering. De Novo DNA founder. Engineering microbes with predictive models & algorithms.
Medicare *option* for all would be a nice compromise. Let employers buy their population into Medicare with pre-tax dollars. Employers can then offer supplemental benefits on top. If you prefer private insurance the whole way? Go for it. Up to you. Choice & competition.
I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review: open.substack.com/pub/blekhman/p…
Check out our website proto.evodesign.org, which visualizes our designs and provides open access to 120+ biological AI models and tools! To learn how to navigate the UI and start designing with our Proto agent, check out youtu.be/8UnOrC_0jmo?si… We've received amazing feedback over the past day and we're excited to see what the community builds! proto.evodesign.org
Together with my co-founders Michael @MichaelPoli6, Stefano @Massastrello and Armin @athmsx, I am excited to announce @RadicalNumerics is emerging from stealth with a $50M seed round to build general biological intelligence. We’re also sharing an early preview of our new model Omnii, the most powerful genome language model to date. Omnii preview link: radicalnumerics.ai/blog/radical-n… At Radical Numerics, our mission is to master the code of life, and to drive the frontier of biological AI for both design and defense. This is our dual mandate, which comes from something our own team helped make possible. Our founding team trained Evo and Evo 2, the largest biological AI models (40B params) trained on DNA sequences. Trillions of tokens across all of life, from microbes to mammals. It’s fully open source, and created the field now known as generative genomics. Last year, scientists used Evo to generate the world’s first complete genome from scratch using AI. Turns out it was a bacteriophage—a type of virus. It functioned in the real world, and in this case it was harmless. But for us, it was a clear turning point. It showed that AI is no longer just analyzing biology. It is on the cusp of generating functional lifeforms. Eventually, AI will have the power to design and control life itself. That should make all of us incredibly excited, and incredibly uneasy. (Anyone can design DNA with a new function, and have it synthesized and delivered, like something from Amazon Prime). The same technology that will help us cure cancer is the very technology that might create the next global pandemic, or worse, allow the creation of bioweapons that can wipe out populations. We believe these forces are inseparable. If you work on the frontier of biology, you have to build technology to safeguard it from its misuse. Existing biosecurity tools are sorely losing the arms race, relying on outdated “have I seen this exact thing before?” style algorithms. We founded Radical Numerics to turn the tide. And we can’t do that by training on textbooks and natural language. We must understand the language of biology from the raw physical data itself, to reason across every molecule and modality, from DNA to proteins. The next frontier for AI goes far beyond chatbots or video generators to models that can understand and engineer life. Today, we’re previewing Omnii, which is already far surpassing Evo 2, and will continue improving as we scale and add new modalities (training now). 1. For human health, Omnii can read and write whole genomes (more on writing later). It’s state of the art (SOTA) on detecting causal variants for disease, and can rank Alzheimer's mutations zero-shot. We’re partnering with a diagnostics company to use Omnii for early cancer detection (pancreatic and multi-cancer). 2. For defense, Omnii is SOTA at detecting AI-generated pathogens. We benchmarked existing detection tools, and they simply can’t detect the AI-generated ones (“deepfake viruses”). We’re partnering with a US national lab to pilot Omnii for detecting the next pandemic, both natural and AI-generated. We have a data center full of Blackwells in construction now to build the most powerful biological AI models ever. This mission takes a new kind of AI lab that can actually scale on physical, biological data: new alignment research (mid/post training), scaling long context, building out mech interp teams to dissect what these models learn, new architectures and systems designs, all from the ground up. Our team is made up of AI researchers and scientists from top labs and institutions (e.g. Stanford, MIT, Google DeepMind), but more importantly, we all share the belief that this is the most important challenge of our lifetime. If you feel similarly, we are hiring. We aim to bring the brightest minds in AI and science together to save lives. Thanks to our partners on this journey, led by Emergence Capital @emergencecap, with Obvious Ventures @obviousvc, Triatomic @TriatomicCap , and Patrick Collison @patrickc. Our advisors include Eric Horvitz @erichorvitz, CSO of Microsoft, Chris Re @HazyResearch of Stanford, George Church @geochurch of Harvard, and Andrew Weber @AndyWeberNCB, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs. Fortune article: fortune.com/2026/06/15/exc… Jobs: radicalnumerics.ai/join-us
I'm not even a fan of Elon Musk, but it's pretty astonishing to me that essentially nobody on the Left can see the plain and simple truth that he crossed the four-comma line by building things many, many, many people benefit from, including lots of jobs and some incredible stuff.
