Poetry, shrimp anatomy & bacterial drug delivery strategies

Your new Strategy Toolkit newsletter (February 25, 2025)

(1) The power of the written word…

Who would have thought that poetry would provide the inspiration for one of the latest large language models? Strategists, I guess. Pattern-seeking is pattern-seeking, after all, whether in a sonnet or in a string of DNA.

That was the inspiration of Stanford University researcher Brian Hie when he invented Evo, an LLM, described as ChatGPT for DNA.

“I have very broad interests, and I explored a lot of career paths. At one point in my life, I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in English literature. In high school and college, I learned to appreciate poetry. The type of poetry I really liked had lyrics that have lots of structure and grand concepts and use language in very new and interesting ways.

“The affinity for scanning a sonnet or identifying structure in a well-composed English lyric is similar to wanting to develop models that make genomic or protein sequences more interpretable and reveal their hidden structure. It’s almost like literary criticism on biology sequences. In that way, I’m still doing literary criticism.”*

* Wickelgren, I., “The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA”, Quanta (February 5, 2025); https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-poetry-fan-who-taught-an-llm-to-read-and-write-dna-20250205/