Yi Tay congratulated Vinh Q. Tran (@vqctran) on his move from Google DeepMind and recalled years of co-inventing work together. The post praised Tran's pursuit of his biology passion, which the quoted post describes as building Polyphron to grow human tissue with frontier models and reinforcement learning.
Congrats @vqctran. So excited for you and see what you achieve next.
We had a lot of fun working together over the years and we co-invented so much together. I will miss you. 🫡
Always remember you joking about quitting AI to do some bio stuff. I'm glad you're finally pursuing your passion.
All the best!
After 10 incredible years at Google, I've left @GoogleDeepMind to join @thematthewosman and @FabioZB_I at Polyphron as a co-founder and explore the next frontier in my research passions. Together, we're training frontier models that autonomously explore, understand, and physically reproduce human tissue biology. It's our grand vision to grow tissues realistic enough to match human response to all drugs, and realistic enough to recover organ function when transplanted into living organisms. Other than the bitter lesson, I think another lesson remains true in the history of ML: the more directly you can optimize your end goal, the better your outcome will be. IMO this is one lesson largely missed in the drug discovery and computational biology space today, and one that Matt and Fabio understood very clearly (and why I joined them on this journey!). At the heart of our company is one giant RL problem: propose a recipe to grow tissue, sample life itself, reward directly against the functionality of the tissue. If this sounds exciting to you as either an AI or Life scientist, feel free to reach out! We're building the coolest lab in NYC :) I'll never forget all of the {pretraining, RL, self-improvement} projects I worked on with my brilliant friends at GDM over the years, but I'm even more excited to share the things we discover next! (p.s. this isn’t the first time i RL’d something based off of similarity, iykyk)View quoted post on X
Source: Yi Tay · x.comPublished · added here
