Training Data · Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Chai Discovery emphasizes a pragmatic approach to building a team that combines diverse expertise, including AI researchers, chemists, biologists, and product engineers. Co-founder Josh highlighted his background in AI from OpenAI, focusing on the question of whether AI could learn DNA and protein languages like it learned human languages. The company believes this interdisciplinary synergy is crucial for advancing AI in drug design.
“So like, I think people like when they start going into the field, they're like, oh man, what's an antibody? What's a mini protein? What are all these like sequences of amino acids?”
“Um, so it was on on the early team there. It was a nonprofit back then. So it was a, pretty good time to be there. We did GPT1, GPT2 scaling laws.”
“Um, and it was the question was like if the models can learn just speak English, German, French, why can't they learn to speak DNA and protein?”