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MJ Max Jaderberg On No Priors

“We make the AI-driven drug design engine in-house and then we actually don't sell the model. We don't license out the model. We don't sell tokens in that way. We use it internally to make medicines.”

No Priors · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026

“We make the AI-driven drug design engine in-house and then we actually don't sell the model. We don't license out the model. We don't sell tokens in that way. We use it internally to make medicines.” — Max Jaderberg, No Priors

Context

Sarah Guo asked how much of Isomorphic's approach is partnering with pharma versus developing its own drugs. Jaderberg describes a business model that keeps the AI private rather than selling API access, a contrast with most frontier AI companies.

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Transcript

No Priors Around 25:08 into the episode
Max Jaderberg

…and we want to test them out in people at the end of the day. So you have to make sure that they work and they're safe. So you have to go into the real world to validate. But the question is, how much can you reduce the amount of time you go into the real world to experiment and to iterate?

Sarah Guo

How much of your approach is focused on partnering with existing pharma companies versus developing your own drugs?

Max Jaderberg

We make the AI-Driven Drug design engine in-house and then we actually don't sell the model. We don't license out the model. We don't sell tokens in that way. We use it internally to make medicines. And then we do that in two ways. We have programs, drug discovery programs that we fully own and fund ourselves and work on ourselves, our internal pipeline. And then we have programs that we work on with amazing pharma companies, biotech, where we partner on these projects. And those are really exciting as well, because often those companies and those teams, they've got amazing ideas and amazing expertise in specific disease areas. And so they come to us with like, these are the hardest problems, maybe problems that they've been working on for sometimes 10, 20 years, not making much progress. And then together, using our drug design engine, we can make a huge amount of progress.

Elad Gil

What are the indication areas or areas of human health that you all are focused on?

Max Jaderberg

Internally, we're focused on much more on oncology, immunology, and inflammation. But the cool thing is, the drug design engine or the models, they're general. They're disease area agnostic. They're target class agnostic. They're modality agnostic. So they work across multiple media. So you're…

Elad Gil

like cancer and is it autoimmune disease or something else? Yeah,

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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