As the AI arms race rages on and many industries invest in the technology, venture capitalist Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital has identified one area of particular interest.
During a recent episode of “The Logan Bartlett Show,” Bartlett, the biotech venture capitalist and co-founder of Lux Capital, said his firm has invested in two key areas of AI over the past two years: biology and robotics.
Wolf predicted that people will be “very bullish” on investing in these sectors, along with aerospace and defense technology, in the next few years.
AI in Biology
“Bringing AI to biology is really interesting because most computer scientists don't fully understand how hard biology is,” he said. “Biology is very complex, it's not linear, it's not 'programmable biology' in the way that a lot of people think of it.”
But Wolf added that most biologists similarly “underestimate how sophisticated computer science and AI are.”
“We have people who are really adept at sitting between those two things and I think they're going to do really well,” he said.
Wolf said the first wave of AI and biology will include biotech companies like Recursion, an investment by Lux Capital, which uses AI to turn photos of cells into computable data to identify biologically meaningful relationships, according to the company's website.
“The AI 2.0 that we're working on right now is using large-scale language models that really nobody has except EvolutionaryScale,” he said, giving a nod to an AI startup founded by former Meta researchers, one of whom previously co-founded a biotech company with Wolf.
After Mehta abandoned the group's project, the researchers approached Wolf, who promptly offered them $25 million, the venture capitalist said.
“He has the only state-of-the-art language model in biology that can actually create things, from prompts to proteins,” he said. “So he's jumping out of the two-dimensional space of code into the three-dimensional space of actually creating proteins.”
The company, which has raised more than $142 million in seed funding led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Lux Capital, launched its AI model, ESM3, in June in partnership with Amazon Web Services.
ESM3 “has the potential to generate entirely new proteins that have never existed in nature,” AWS said in a press release, and the company has already created its first protein, an unevolved version of a fluorescent protein.
“There are lots of ways that evolution has found them, but they've found a way that evolution never found, which is pretty amazing,” Wolf said. “So the implications of being able to make antibodies, small molecules, drugs, proteins are huge.”
AI in Robotics
When we think of “robots,” we usually think of futuristic humanoid technology like Elon Musk's Optimus Prime, but Wolf says he doesn't think “humanoid robots will ever go mainstream.”
“What they're focusing on is training data, repositories for general robot intelligence,” he said. “I think there's value there.”
Wolf said he believes humanoid robots are intriguing and will attract funding, but that robots that mimic human capabilities are “far inferior to what a robot can do.”
Rather, he said, the value of robotics will be as a repository of data that can train robots to live in unconstrained environments, similar to how LLM develops predictive chatbots trained from a wealth of known information from the internet.
“I think the winning model will be a highly specialised robot that does one or two specific tasks, and does them very well,” he said.
Wolf said he believes a major race will break out among humanoid robot companies, including China's Unitree Robotics, to develop a general-purpose operating system.
“But I think the value will be in the information,” he added.
