Opening Bid Unfiltered AI is disrupting drug discovery faster than expected
Feb 17, 2026
Joshua Meier, co-founder of Chai Discovery and former researcher at OpenAI and Meta, applies large-scale AI to protein and molecule design. He talks about Chai’s molecule-design platform and rapid lab success improvements. Conversations cover partnerships with big pharma, scaling compute and data, and how AI is unlocking previously undruggable biology.
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Atom-Level Drug Design Is Now Practical
- Chai Discovery builds a computer-aided design suite that designs drug molecules down to the atomic level.
- Joshua Meier says those designs now achieve much higher real-world lab success rates than before.
High School Stem Cell Class Sparked Career
- Joshua Meier traced his interest to high school where a stem cell class introduced him to programming cells.
- That early mix of coding and biology shaped his career path into AI-driven molecular work.
From OpenAI To Protein Language Models
- Meier described moving from OpenAI to Facebook to apply language-model ideas to DNA and proteins.
- He credits early work on protein language models as the origin of his approach to biological AI.