Ben Lamm

there is no dino dna because the earth went through various heating periods since extinction of the dinosaurs also dna like right now the oldest dna we're working with is about 1.5 million years old it's not 65 million years that's a big jump amber's a very porous material it develops in very hot places wet places that's not good for dna storage so there is no amber dna there is no dino dna

Yeah, well, I don't know if there's any big reveals, but I'm, you know, I'm pretty open book.

So an AI is critical to what we do at Colossal.

So I'm pretty stoked about tomorrow.

Yeah.

How are you using AI at Colossal mainly?

Yeah, I mean, we use AI in every single part of the project.

Most people don't realize that.

They think of us just being like

you know, in a lab, but there's a lot of field work, there's expeditions, it's kind of weird, it's kind of like Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, but then there's also this huge AI component that people don't realize.

We're using AI for everything from like ancient DNA assembly to comparative genomics to, we've actually built some pretty cool models

where if we're looking at things like skull morphology like for the dodo we've actually scanned over a thousand different uh skulls from from a bird beak morphology perspective from all these birds then we've sequenced them then we use ai to compare all of the actual images to that sequence data to then relevance rank you know the biggest uh gene variants that we think will drive kind of that morphology that made kind of the

beak and cranial facial development of the Dodo actually look like the Dodo, right?

It was actually unique to them.

And so we're using AI all the time.

Another thing that we're doing that's pretty cool with AI is that most people just use like, think if it's like CRISPR or think if it's like gene editing, it's kind of like a catch-all.

But really we use a combination of tools.

Sometimes it's like little edits to one genome.

Sometimes it's synthesizing an entire block.

Sometimes it's like inserting that block.