Post by Vinay Seth Mohta

Ninety days ago, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5. Within weeks, Andrej Karpathy, who isn’t someone prone to hyperbole wrote that his coding workflow had undergone "the biggest change in ~2 decades of programming" and that it "happened over the course of a few weeks." Since then, Matt Shumer's "Something Big is Happening" has been viewed over 80 million times. All of this will flow into every vertical and function in the coming months. We’re of course focused on life sciences. Life sciences data is uniquely complex, multi-modal, governed, and distributed across organizational boundaries. There’s the work involved in making the vertical “legible” to agents: to integrate into existing infrastructure, to respect compliance frameworks, to use the right tools to process a long tail of data types. That's the bet we made at Manifold ~3 years ago. We spent that time heads down building the AI platform for life sciences — the security and governance, the enterprise infrastructure integration, the data layer, the tools ecosystem, the collaboration layer— because we expected some variation of this moment. So this release just accelerated our thesis. And the next 12 months will separate the vertical AI platforms that are genuinely built for this moment in their domain from horizontal platforms and legacy point solutions. The headlines are focused on the jobs AI may replace. We’re more excited about the speed up it makes possible. Every month we compress the gap between what our best researchers know and what they can actually do is a month closer to getting a novel therapy to a parent, a spouse, or a child who's waiting for it.