Topic
11 facts from 1 episode, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2025
Leash Bio started an internal project to fine-tune language models to understand SMILES because no existing frontier model handled it well.
“We had started an internal project to do, uh, supervised fine tuning on some of these language models to get them to understand smiles, because none of the existing frontier models were any good at it.”
2026
In Leash Bio's structure-activity relationship task, each AI agent gets a budget of 100 molecules and is told only the target protein.
“You have a budget of a hundred molecules. We're not gonna tell you anything except the target and, uh, go find the best binder you can.”
2026
Leash Bio reports running about 90,000 agent rollouts in its pre-measured environment.
“And because it's all pre-measured, you can roll out a lot of these. We're up to about 90,000.”
2026
Ian Quigley says the benchmark separates agents well across different model families and capability levels.
“we get great separation of agents across, uh, model families and different levels, that kind of stuff.”
2026
Leash Bio observed agent failure modes including quitting early, choosing molecules that contradict their own hypotheses, and repeatedly retesting the same molecules despite a limited budget.
“agents that give up early, uh, want to buy molecules that don't agree with their SAR hypotheses, ones that keep retesting the same molecules over and over, despite having a limited budget.”
2026
Ian Quigley says that around February AI models became able to work with chemistry in a meaningful way, which led Leash Bio to build this environment.
“around February, like a lot of other things, uh, it became clear that they could start to actually work with chemistry in a meaningful way”
2026
Ian Quigley says Leash Bio does not use Bayesian hyperparameter optimization as a baseline because he thinks the landscape is too spiky and too high-dimensional.
“We think it's too spiky of a landscape and it's very high dimensional.”
2026
Leash Bio plans to release a set of environments along with many thousands of agent transcripts alongside its paper.
“we're gonna release a bunch of these environments as hardware packages. And then many thousands of transcripts, uh, for people to go play with”
2026
Since its founding, Leash Bio has screened about a thousand proteins against a couple of its chemical libraries.
“We've screened about a thousand proteins, uh, against a couple of these chemical libraries since we started Leash, and we're gonna start to grow that.”
Undated
Leash Bio previously built a game somewhat like a human version of this task, called Name that chemist.
“We did do a game a little bit like this for Name that chemist.”
Undated
A host compared Leash Bio's approach to Lila, which runs experiments and uses the results in rollouts rather than performing them live.
“they also do experiments and then they use that in their rollout, but they're not doing them live.”
Episodes