The Best of 2025 (So Far) with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil
2025 has thus far been a year of great leaps and advances in AI technology. And Sarah and Elad have spoken with some of the most enterprising founders and scientific minds in the field of AI today. So we’re revisiting a few of our favorite conversations on No Priors so far in 2025 – Winston Weinberg (Harvey), Dr. Fei-Fei Li (World Labs), Brendan Foody (Mercor), Dan Hendrycks (Center for AI Safety), Noubar Afeyan (Flagship Pioneering), Brandon McKinzie and Eric Mitchell (OpenAI o3), Isa Fulford (OpenAI), Arvind Jain (Glen), and Dr. Shiv Rao (Abridge).
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Chapters:
00:00 – Episode Introduction
0:21 – Winston Weinberg on Leaning into New Capabilities
02:01 – Dr. Fei-Fei Li on Spatial Intelligence
04:13 – Brendan Foody on AI Disruption in the Workforce
06:10 – Dan Hendrycks on the Geopolitics of Superintelligence
08:06 – Noubar Afeyan on Entrepreneurship
10:38 – Brandon McKinzie and Eric Mitchell on Reasoning Models
12:41 – Isa Fulford on Training Deep Research
13:49 – Arvind Jain on Innovating Enterprise Search
16:21 – Dr. Shiv Rao on AI’s Human Impact
18:58 – Conclusion
Building the Platform for Scientific Breakthrough, with Noubar Afeyan of Moderna and Flagship Pioneering
This week on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Noubar Afeyan, Co-founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, the biotech firm behind groundbreaking companies like Moderna. They explore how Flagship creates the conditions for scientific breakthroughs, tackles regulatory uncertainty, and pushes the boundaries of discovery. Noubar shares insights on AI’s role in healthcare, the challenges of bringing new therapies to market, and lessons learned from past pandemics. He also discusses Flagship’s platform approach to biotech innovation and introduces the idea of polyintelligence.
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Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
0:48 Founding Flagship
5:51 Fostering environments for emergence
11:17 Expanding into new frontiers
14:26 Developing technology amid regulatory uncertainty and risk
19:12 How Flagship has evolved
22:47 AI applications in healthcare
27:30 Bottlenecks in bringing new therapies to market
32:20 Lessons for the next pandemic
34:11 Building a platform
38:10 Polyintelligence
Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan
In the field of bio-tech, it can take 10 years and millions of dollars to see if an experimental idea might turn into a life-saving treatment—if it ever does. Noubar Afeyan fully understood those risks when he co-founded Moderna in 2010. He and his colleagues were looking for a way to deploy the messenger RNA molecule to tackle life-threatening diseases. In January of 2020, an urgent opportunity presented itself in the form of a deadly virus that was spreading across the globe. At a breathtaking pace, Moderna produced a prototype for a COVID-19 vaccine, partnered with the NIH to test it, and produced millions of doses, becoming part of the most rapid vaccine roll-out in human history. While Moderna is the best known of Noubar's companies, he has launched many others in the bio-tech space as part of Flagship Pioneering, his multi-billion dollar venture studio.
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