Dr. Richard Moulange

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1,784 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 31 Mar

Dr. Richard Moulange’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #241 – Richard Moulange on how now AI codes viable genomes from scratch and outperforms virologists at lab work — what could go wrong? · 31 Mar 2026 podcast

And they heavily use these design tools to make it work.

I think if anything, we should be careful not to underestimate how important these tools are or how mature they are, because a lot of the applications commercially will be in pharmaceutical companies that famously have 10 plus year timelines and are very secretive.

So I think you should always be open to the possibility that these tools are more rather than less developed than we think.

But it might be they're only fine-tuned in-house.

You also mentioned ESM2.

So I'd actually say, well, there's been a success for that for a while, ESM3.

But yes, ESM is, I think it stands for evolutionary sequence modeling.

It's one of the most classic protein language models.

So it's closer to Evo, but it sort of works on amino acids rather than individual base pairs, A's, C's, G's, and T's.

And actually, the clever thing about ESM3 is that it's not just sequence.

ESM3 is a multimodal protein language model.

It can do sequence, and it can take in structure both at once, and it can combine both these different things.

Whereas AlphaFold, you just put in a sequence, you get out the structure.

And there are other things where you just put a structure in, and then it'll design a sequence to fit on that.

Like there are ways to do this with protein MPNN.

You're right that sequence-to-function tools are... Well, they don't really exist yet.

We have sort of prototypes, but there's been nothing close to AlphaFold, a sort of moment where we've solved sequence-to-function.

But this is the holy grail because that's what you want.

You want to be able to put in certain letters and then to achieve a real effect in the world.

Sequence-to-function tools would be deeply, deeply dual use because if you can...

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