Oliver Vince

24 Mar 2026Meta(re)verse, EU INC, Vibedesign, Microsoft Vs. OpenAI, The Situation Room

1:59:561 min

Oliver Vince (Basecamp Research) Interview Begins

After a Base ad read, the hosts welcome Oliver Vince, co-founder of Basecamp Research, noting he must be busy and that the company is doing world-changing work — per the earlier rundown, building the trillion gene atlas, the biggest effort to map life on Earth since the Human Genome Project, in partnership with NVIDIA and Anthropic. The conversation is just getting underway as this part of the recording ends.

1:59:56

2:00:2821 min

Basecamp Research: Programming DNA with AI

The co-founder of Basecamp Research explains how the company trains GPT-4-scale models purely on DNA sequences to "program biology," pairing Anthropic's Claude (which drafts treatment plans) with their own models that design the actual genetic sequences — e.g., a custom antibiotic for a hospital patient in real time, aimed first at complex diseases like cancer rather than consumer use. He recounts the founding story — PhDs in brain cancer and HIV drug research, starting the company months after OpenAI's scaling laws paper — and the field expeditions (ice caps, now 31 countries) that feed a planned trillion-gene Atlas built on fully consented data. He also discusses being named in Jensen Huang's UK AI investment announcement after NVIDIA spent a year embedded with the team, and closes arguing that smart, ambitious people should choose hard, mission-driven work.

2:00:28