@columbia cs & math. prev. @googledeepmind gsoc, @fdotinc. hongkongese. Founder @ Coglix Labs, AI personalized neuro-recovery.
Hong Kong / NYC incoming
Joined July 2023
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hailey retweeted
Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech
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Surprise 2: that person is me
Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it
Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post
…and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline
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Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere.
The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases.
Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat.
In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally.
Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants).
In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model.
From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team.
Why join Anthropic? Three reasons.
(1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work.
(2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter.
(3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing.
Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit.
Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest).
Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have.
It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way.
But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember...
Gotta Cure 'Em All
hailey retweeted
you don't have to hide that you want to win
everyone here already wants to win. it requires huge effort to work in sf or have a big following
the decision is between lying that you don't care, or being honest and let people make informed decisions. choose honesty
rant:
hailey retweeted
We're publishing our most detailed threat intelligence report to date.
It covers how people tried to misuse Claude—for cyberattacks, influence operations, surveillance, biology, and building weapons—and how we found and stopped them.
We disrupted every operation in the report, and used the lessons from them to strengthen our safeguards. Where appropriate, we also shared what we found with authorities and other AI companies.
These cases are not typical: we’re highlighting some of the most sophisticated misuse we’ve seen. But they’re especially important to discuss, because they show us where AI misuse is headed, where our safeguards work, and where they need to improve.
We’re publishing this report so others can spot the same activity on their own platforms, and so we can give the public a clearer view of how emerging threats develop.
Read the report: anthropic.com/threat-intelli…
if the person leading alignment sci at A/ sincerely thinks there is a >10% chance AI kills all humans within the next decade, and says we still don't have a plan to align superintelligence or a clear path to one, I think we're allowed to ask why the default is still to keep racing toward it.
“china will build ASI anyway, so we have to get there first” isn't the trump card people treat it as. china may be a reason to take the problem more seriously and invest heavily in safety. it isn't a blank cheque to accelerate toward something you yourself think could end humanity.
if every lab and every country points at everyone else and says “we can't slow down because they wont” that isn't a safety strategy. that's exactly how you create the race you're supposedly afraid of.
and if the failure mode is extinction “we beat china to ASI” is meaningless if nobody survives the win.
hailey retweeted
“we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”
i mean props to them for straight coming clean.
(so far the proof looks more along the lines of another euler blowup proof we had, off of whose ansatz naming we were making really stupid puns like “smooth criminale”, unlike the much better “ideal fluids explode”, Tristan)
so i’ll now give a bit on my thinking here. i actually woulda been pumped to collaborate on this, there are a lot of people at oai i like (ok, clearly some were indirectly dicks to me because of being part of the whole situation, but im a big boy, i still like them), idgaf about authorship on that step anyway, coulda been me Tristan and every fte at oai for all i care (on that Tristan would disagree:p). but on hearing the loud convo in the hallway, especially the part where a millennium prize was offered if i’d just be removed from the paper, it was kinda clear the die had been cast and things were locked. pretty wacky, unstrategic, and unnecessary, since on my side things were mostly me and claude having a good time yoloing random stuff in the corner rather than anything institutional. i also like the idea of the labs cooperating, and even better on scientific progress. it’s a shame!
We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work.
We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem.
While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.
However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs. unforced).
hailey retweeted
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
hailey retweeted
Say what you want about the Left, but these people understand that institutions shape public consciousness and that the elites who run them get to determine what's promoted by society.
These people almost instinctively understand that power and culture are in a circular feedback loop that's set into motion when just a handful of levers are pulled. So they pour everything they can into controlling those levers, because they so desperately want the power that comes along with it.
The Left doesn't actually particularly care about the universities, Hollywood, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or the various media outlets that all regurgitate the eternal Progressive omnicause. This is why they're leading all of these things to ruin. They're just tools for acquiring what actually matters, which is power.
For a bunch of self-proclaimed egalitarians, the Left understands politics, hierarchy, and elite theory far better than the Right.
And speaking of the Right, is it even fair to say "the Right" exists at all? There's just the "anti-Left", and these people only exist as a political "we" through the pure negation of the eternal Progressive omnicause.
The anti-Left is also inherently anti-political. The only thing that crosses their minds is how to escape. "How do I get the government off my back?" they ask over and over again. "How do I keep more of my money?" "How do I get these people to leave me alone?" "How do I get the government out of X?"
The anti-Left has precisely ZERO theory of politics and no governing agenda, because these people don't want to be governed at all. They want to abolish the very concepts of governing, and thus politics itself.
They're essentially anarchists in the truest sense of the word, even more committed to the cause than self-described Anarcho-Capitalists are. At least those people have Hoppe.
But politics does not disappear just because one side finds it morally repugnant. The anti-Left's commitment to anti-politics does not create genuine freedom or liberation from the state. It just creates a vacuum that inevitably gets filled by whichever group has the strongest will to power.
And Progressives have a stronger will to power. These people will riot over a crackhead overdosing on fentanyl. They will claim that men can become women. They will declare that urinals are art and that Boston's City Hall is breathtakingly beautiful. They will murder their political adversaries in cold blood on college campuses and then go online to publicly cheer about it. They will declare borders invalid and chant Free Palestine. They will brag to you that Somalis built America, even as they claim America itself is uniquely evil and must be destroyed.
And in the face of this insanity, the anti-Left's response is to meekly beg, "Just please leave me alone." More than anything else, they just want to escape from this madness.
But politics is precisely that which you cannot escape from.
Someone IS GOING TO decide what gets taught to children, what speech is going to get you canceled, what social behaviors get you sent to prison vs being given an honorary doctorate, what international borders exist and who controls them, what institutions are allowed to openly discriminate against, and what lifestyles are celebrated or mocked.
Even the decision to "just leave people alone" is not an escape from politics. Choosing to "leave someone alone" is ITSELF a political decision made by whoever the ruling elites are, and enforced by the institutions they control.
The anti-political anti-Left has either totally forgotten all of this, or they never understood it to begin with, which is why they are being systematically crushed, no matter how many elections they win.
hailey retweeted
If you're a Westerner reading this, please do not fall into the trap of thinking "oh, China is scared. Freedom wins again. We’ve got the AI race in the bag.”
This idea that closed authoritarian systems cannot innovate needs to be challenged. There are countless examples in history of these types of societies innovating ruthlessly, relentlessly, and often faster than we care to admit.
The Soviet Union put Sputnik in orbit and Yuri Gagarin in space while half the West was still debating whether color TV was a fad. Nazi Germany built the V-2 rocket and the first jet fighters under a regime that made today’s CCP look like a book club. Imperial Japan industrialized at breakneck speed under militarist control. And modern China? High-speed rail networks, dominance in solar panels, EVs, batteries, hypersonic missiles, quantum research, and now - yes! - frontier AI models.
SURE, tech transfer and industrial espionage means China's rapid advancement wasn't achieved without an assist from the West but that doesn't mean that China cannot innovate because they have stamped out individualism and hedonistic self-expression.
Talent responds to incentives. Authoritarian regimes can offer massive incentives to engineers - priority access to compute clusters, blank check funding, zero regulatory friction, and the blunt threat of consequences if you don't deliver.
Read China's move as an escalation in the AI race. They're now treating their AI researchers the way the Manhattan Project treated its physicists - as national assets.
for startup founders with chinese (or hong kong) nationality who want to build in the US, this recent wave of news feels increasingly concerning.
- bloomberg reports china is increasing restrictions on overseas travel for some top ai talent, and cases like manus suggest stronger control over founders and acquisitions.
- in the case of manus, the government allegedly blocked a potential acquisition deal by meta, called the founder back, and then restricted their ability to travel abroad afterwards.
- at the same time, the US is reportedly tightening parts of the green card process, with more cases potentially requiring applicants to return to their home country for consular processing.
taken together, i wouldn’t be surprised if investors start getting worried about what happens when founders have to go back to their home country for visa/green card.
hailey retweeted
China is restricting overseas travel for top AI professionals in private firms such as Alibaba and DeepSeek, suggesting an escalation in measures intended to safeguard its technology and catch up to the US in a pivotal sphere.
Government agencies have begun imposing restrictions on individuals involved in advanced AI work and considered strategically important to the country, people familiar with the matter said. bloom.bg/4uy8OPC
📷: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
I just interviewed with t1 accelerator (yc/a16z speedrun), and one of the final topics they asked about was my visa status. I shared that I’m currently based in Hong Kong and plan to get O1 visa. During the pre-interview process, they had also asked about my country of citizenship.
They mentioned that due to political changes, they’re unable to fund me at this stage.
They told me they were positive about me/my video and encouraged me to stay in touch.
rejected by a16z speedrun officially
- citizenship asked during 1) initial application, 2) pre interview form, 3) follow up email, and 4) reconfirmed again in the final 10 min interview together with visa status
- hongkongese, no visa, delware corp without china/hong kong business
- told: “you’re solo founder and due to political change, we cannot fund it, but we like u/ur video”
not sure if this is related to broader us-china tensions, or things like reports of china blocking the manus meta deal, but as a hongkongese faced political dramas in hong kong & just trying to build a career in the us, i unfortunately seem to be caught in the middle
rejected by a16z speedrun officially
- citizenship asked during 1) initial application, 2) pre interview form, 3) follow up email, and 4) reconfirmed again in the final 10 min interview together with visa status
- hongkongese, no visa, delware corp without china/hong kong business
- told: “you’re solo founder and due to political change, we cannot fund it, but we like u/ur video”
not sure if this is related to broader us-china tensions, or things like reports of china blocking the manus meta deal, but as a hongkongese faced political dramas in hong kong & just trying to build a career in the us, i unfortunately seem to be caught in the middle