{"id":616015,"date":"2023-03-09T08:48:47","date_gmt":"2023-03-09T14:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/09\/sam-altman-invested-180-million-into-a-company-trying-to-delay-death\/"},"modified":"2023-03-09T08:48:47","modified_gmt":"2023-03-09T14:48:47","slug":"sam-altman-invested-180-million-into-a-company-trying-to-delay-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/09\/sam-altman-invested-180-million-into-a-company-trying-to-delay-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When a startup called Retro Biosciences eased out of stealth mode in mid-2022, it announced it had secured $180 million to bankroll an audacious mission: to add 10 years to the average human life span<\/a>. It had set up its headquarters in a raw warehouse space near San Francisco just the year before, bolting shipping containers to the concrete floor to quickly make lab space for the scientists who had been enticed to join the company.<\/p>\n

Retro said that it would \u201cprize speed\u201d and \u201ctighten feedback loops\u201d as part of an \u201caggressive mission\u201d to stall aging, or even reverse it. But it was vague about where its money had come from. At the time, it was a \u201cmysterious startup,\u201d according to press<\/a> reports<\/a>, \u201cwhose investors remain anonymous.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Now MIT Technology Review can reveal that the entire sum was put up by Sam Altman, the 37-year-old startup guru and investor who is CEO of OpenAI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Altman spends nearly all his time at OpenAI<\/a>, an artificial-intelligence company whose chatbots and electronic art programs have been convulsing the tech sphere with their human-like capabilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Altman\u2019s money is a different matter. He says he\u2019s emptied his bank account to fund two other very different but equally ambitious goals: limitless energy and extended life span.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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One of those bets is on the fusion power startup Helion Energy, into which he\u2019s poured more than $375 million, he told CNBC in 2021. The other is Retro, to which Altman cut checks totaling $180 million the same year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a lot. I basically just took all my liquid net worth and put it into these two companies,\u201d Altman says.<\/p>\n

Altman\u2019s investment in Retro hasn\u2019t been previously reported. It is among the largest ever by an individual into a startup pursuing human longevity.<\/p>\n

Altman has long been a prominent figure in the Silicon Valley scene, where he previously ran the startup incubator Y Combinator in San Francisco. But his profile has gone global with OpenAI\u2019s release of ChatGPT, software that\u2019s able to write poems and answer questions.<\/p>\n

The AI breakthrough, according to Fortune<\/a>, has turned the seven-year-old company into \u201can unlikely member of the club of tech superpowers.\u201d Microsoft committed to investing $10 billion, and Altman, with 1.5 million Twitter followers, is consolidating a reputation as a heavy hitter whose creations seem certain to alter society in profound ways.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Altman does not appear on the Forbes billionaires list, but that doesn\u2019t mean he isn\u2019t extremely wealthy. His wide-ranging investments have included early stakes in companies like Stripe and Airbnb.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cI have been an early-stage tech investor in the greatest bull market in history,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hard tech<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Now, he is putting his capital to work at a level he calls an \u201corder of magnitude\u201d greater than he could during his Y Combinator days. And he has been concentrating those bets into a few areas of technology he thinks will have the biggest positive impact on human affairs: AI, energy, and anti-aging biotech.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Helion, based in Everett, Washington, aspires to tame atom smashing to create a \u201climitless source of clean energy.\u201d Retro\u2019s aim is to prolong human life by discovering how to rejuvenate our bodies, according to its CEO and cofounder, the entrepreneur Joe Betts-LaCroix.<\/p>\n

All these companies, including OpenAI, are what Altman calls \u201chard\u201d startups\u2014those requiring large investments in order to make scientific advances and master difficult technology. It\u2019s a shift for Altman, from backing fast-growth apps and their founders during the Web 2.0 boom to backing scientists pursuing long-term research.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hard science companies are more expensive to fund, but Altman thinks their larger goals are more likely to attract talented engineers. He recently tweeted<\/a> a quote from the Victorian-era architect Daniel Burnham: \u201cMake no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

While fusion and life extension could be implausible projects (some researchers say they are pipe dreams), it\u2019s also true that few people expected to see an AI passing a medical school exam in 2023, as OpenAI\u2019s question-answering software ChatGPT did this year. In fact, Altman says, hard startups may stand a better chance of success than easy ones. That\u2019s because there may be a thousand startups hawking photo-sharing apps, but there are only a few capable of building experimental fusion reactors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Scaling up<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Altman says he has been placing bets in areas where underlying trends make him think technologies that look impossible today might actually work relatively soon. That is what happened at OpenAI, founded in 2015. The company took a type of machine-learning program called a transformer and steadily scaled it up, spending more than a billion dollars to buy computer time as it built its products.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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The resulting programs can, in just seconds, create pictures and complex text passages that pass for the work of humans. \u201cWe have an algorithm that can learn, and it seems to keep scaling with more compute,\u201d Altman recently told Rescale<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With fusion power, the trend Altman saw was toward bigger and stronger magnets. Magnets are needed to hold in place the 100-million-degree vortex of hot plasma at the core of a reactor. Altman says he initially invested around $10 million in Helion but then ramped up his bet as he \u201cbecame super confident it is going to work.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Even though fusion isn\u2019t yet solved (the reactors still use more energy than they make<\/a>), he has been urging Helion to lay plans for how it might build several reactors a day, something necessary if fusion power is to take over from coal and gas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe central learning of my career has been that. Like, scale it up and see what happens,\u201d says Altman.<\/p>\n

Young blood<\/strong><\/h3>\n

About eight years ago, Altman became interested in so-called \u201cyoung blood\u201d research. These were studies in which scientists sewed young and old mice together so that they shared one blood system. The surprise: the old mice seemed to be partly rejuvenated.<\/p>\n

A grisly experiment, but in a way, remarkably simple. Altman was head of Y Combinator at the time, and he tasked his staff with looking into the progress being made by anti-aging scientists.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt felt like, all right, this was a result I didn\u2019t expect and another one I didn\u2019t expect,\u201d he says. \u201cSo there\u2019s something going on where \u2026 maybe there is a secret here that is going to be easier to find than we think.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2018, Y Combinator launched a special course for biotech companies, inviting those with \u201cradical anti-aging schemes<\/a>\u201d to apply, but before long, Altman moved away from Y Combinator to focus on his growing role at OpenAI.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Then, in 2020, researchers in California showed<\/a> they could achieve an effect similar to young blood by replacing the plasma of old mice with salt water and albumin. That suggested the real problem lay in the old blood. Simply by diluting it (and the toxins in it), medicine might get one step closer to a cure for aging.<\/p>\n

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These were studies in which scientists sewed young and old mice together so that they shared one blood system. The surprise: the old mice seemed to be partly rejuvenated.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cSam called me up and said \u2018Holy moly\u2019\u2014I\u2019m paraphrasing, that\u2019s not exactly what he said\u2014\u2018Did you see this plasma intervention paper?\u2019\u201d recalls Betts-LaCroix, who had once been the part-time biotech partner at Y Combinator and still leads a meetup<\/a> for longevity enthusiasts.<\/p>\n

Betts-LaCroix agreed that it was cool and some company should pursue it. \u201cHow about I fund you to do it?\u201d Altman said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Betts-LaCroix was already working on a different idea. He had just wrapped up an earlier venture, a company called Vium, which had tried to \u201cdigitize\u201d mouse colonies, adding cameras and AI to monitor experiments. Vium had raised more than $50 million but hadn\u2019t been successful. That year, it was folded into another biotech company, which paid $2.6 million for its assets.<\/p>\n

Betts-LaCroix\u2019s new plan was to start a company to pursue cellular reprogramming<\/a>\u2014another hot area, involving techniques to make cells younger through genetic engineering. He\u2019d already teamed up with a Chinese researcher, Sheng Ding, who\u2019d developed new ways to reprogram cells. Betts-LaCroix also thought processes that cells use to dispose of toxins (known as autophagy) could be an important avenue to explore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Altman\u2019s response: \u201cWhy don\u2019t you do all those things?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll do it. I\u2019ll build a multi-program company around aging biology, and that is the big play,\u201d Betts-LaCroix recalls saying. \u201cHe was like, \u2018Great\u2014let\u2019s go for it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The new company would need a lot of money\u2014enough to keep it afloat at least seven or eight years while it carried out research, ran into setbacks, and overcame them. It would also need to get things done quickly. Spending at many biotech startups is decided on by a board of directors, but at Retro, Betts-LaCroix has all the decision-making power.\u00a0 \u201cWe have no bureaucracy,\u2019 he says. \u201cI am the bureaucracy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For instance, instead of waiting for scarce lab space to become available, Betts-LaCroix filled a warehouse with those 40 prefab shipping containers outfitted as laboratories. That meant it could quickly carry out its first experiments, including repeating some of the plasma work in mice. Betts-LaCroix presented some initial results at a meeting last year, saying that mice given plasma replacement did seem to be stronger after the treatment.<\/p>\n

Mysterious startup<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Retro\u2019s staff file memos each week about what went well in the lab and what went poorly. Often, says Betts-LaCroix, he\u2019ll call on the weekend to pass along highlights to Altman, who sometimes makes suggestions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Until now, though, Altman\u2019s involvement in the company has been kept confidential. That was a decision made by Betts-LaCroix, who wanted to let Retro carve its own path. Altman agreed, since he tries \u201cto be super careful about not overshadowing the CEOs I work with.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

When Betts-LaCroix brought the company out of stealth in mid-2022, via a series of tweets, he didn\u2019t publicly reveal the checks Altman had written the year before, instead saying he was \u201cfortunate to have initial funding in the amount of $180 million\u201d that would \u201csecure\u201d the company\u2019s operations for the rest of the decade as it reached its \u201cfirst proofs of concept\u201d for life extension.<\/p>\n

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\"Retro
Joe Betts-Lacroix, CEO of Retro Biosciences, poses with staffers on top of shipping containers the company uses as lab space.<\/figcaption>

RETRO BIO<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

That was also because Altman\u2019s name could prove a distraction, say people familiar with the company\u2019s thinking. Sure, he had a big name, but it was for the wrong reasons. Although Altman\u2019s stature in the startup world is unmatched, his reputation is almost nonexistent in biology labs and pharmaceutical circles, settings in which a person\u2019s scientific record is paramount.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI have never heard the name Sam Altman,\u201d says Irina Conboy, the researcher at UC Berkeley whose work in plasma had so wowed him. She does know Betts-LaCroix from the longevity scene but says that during a lunch meeting he arranged to discuss the business, she let him know she was focused on scientific discoveries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA hundred million is a number, not a breakthrough,\u201d says Conboy.<\/p>\n

Bad press<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Every technology also has risks. In the case of AI, it is chatbots that spew lies and misinformation. For age reversal, if it ever works, one often cited risk is public resentment, especially if it\u2019s going to be made available to rich people<\/a> like Altman first. If Altman\u2019s backing were made prominent, the thinking went, Retro could be pigeonholed as a billionaire\u2019s misguided vanity project.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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There was reason to worry. In 2016, after Peter Thiel, one of Altman\u2019s mentors<\/a>, expressed interest in possibly getting age-defeating blood transfusions, he was mocked<\/a> in the media<\/a> as a vampire on the prowl for young victims. A year later, the HBO parody show Silicon Valley<\/em> drove the stake in<\/a> with an episode called \u201cBlood Boy<\/a>.\u201d In it, a fictional tech CEO takes a meeting while his veins are connected to those of a handsome young man introduced as his \u201ctransfusion associate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t really want \u2026 these old billionaires having to pay the plasma donors to come give them donations,\u201d Betts-LaCroix told<\/a> an audience in Europe last summer. He said the company instead hopes to find more \u201cplausible\u201d interventions, like drugs that mimic the effects of blood replacement and could be used by millions of people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t want to discriminate against billionaires. I\u2019m just saying we don\u2019t want therapies that are super expensive and awkward and difficult to implement,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

For his part, Altman says his personal anti-aging regime consists of \u201ctrying to eat healthy, exercise, sleep enough\u201d and taking metformin, a diabetes drug that has also become popular in Silicon Valley circles<\/a> on the theory that it might be able to keep people healthier for longer. \u201cI hope to use a Retro therapy someday!\u201d Altman says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

OpenAI for longevity<\/strong><\/h3>\n

One reason anti-aging research can seem like a promising area for investment is that it has not drawn much funding in the past, at least relative to the size of the problem. Nearly a fifth of the US GDP\u2014$4.3 trillion, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services\u2014is spent on health care, and much of that is to treat the elderly. A widespread view among longevity researchers is that if aging could be delayed with a drug, it could help postpone a host of serious diseases, including cancer and heart disease.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To make the widest impact, Betts-LaCroix says, he is looking for interventions that can be scaled up and reach \u201cmillions or billions\u201d of people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe don\u2019t want to discriminate against billionaires. I\u2019m just saying we don\u2019t want therapies that are super expensive and awkward and difficult to implement,\u201d<\/p>\n

Betts-LaCroix<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

By the time Retro came out of stealth, though, the assault on old age was going through a period of intense popularity. The Saudi government said it would give out $1 billion in grants<\/a> each year and an organization called Altos Labs<\/a> had formed with what it would claim was $3 billion<\/a> in funding. It too had famous investors, like Yuri Milner and, according to some sources, Jeff Bezos.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In comparison to these ventures, Altman\u2019s bet now looks relatively small, even making Retro seem like an underdog. One of its projects is to test rejuvenation techniques on T cells, part of the immune system that play an important role in fighting infection and staving off cancer. These cells are especially useful because they can be removed, rejuvenated in the lab, and then returned to a patient. But other startups have similar goals, including Altos and NewLimit, a biotech company started by the cryptocurrency billionaire Brian Armstrong last year. Competition for research talent is especially stiff. Altos sucked up half the leading scientists in reprogramming when it convinced two dozen university professors to leave their jobs, offering million-dollar salaries, among other benefits.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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But Betts-LaCroix has managed to lure some top minds as well. Last year, for instance, he jumped on a plane to Switzerland to woo Alejandro Ocampo, a researcher at the University of Lausanne whose initial efforts to rejuvenate mice <\/a>in 2016 helped spark the current frenzy of longevity investment.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI was happy to see Joe would fly all the way to see me in person,\u201d says Ocampo, who appreciated being courted and later agreed to be a paid consultant to the company.<\/p>\n

He also says Betts-LaCroix was open to his opinion that age reversal in humans isn\u2019t going to happen anytime soon. Some of Ocampo\u2019s recent experiments have explored why reprogramming, the method he studies, even ends up killing some mice instead of making them live longer. \u201cThere are optimists who think we\u2019ll be immortal in 10 years, and there are pessimists who say we will never extend human life,\u201d says Ocampo. \u201cI am a realist, and my personal view is that everyone is doing the easy, fast experiment, and if we do that I don\u2019t think we are going to get very far. It\u2019s not going to be a simple path.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ocampo says Betts-LaCroix convinced him that Retro would be willing to use its money to explore those fundamental questions. \u201cThey wanted to advance the science, not only go after the low-hanging fruit,\u201d he says. \u201cOther companies need to find an immediate application, but in their case they can spend time exploring the basic science as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

One thing Betts-LaCroix and Ocampo didn\u2019t talk about was where Retro\u2019s money had come from. Until asked by MIT Technology Review, Ocampo says, he had no idea Altman was funding the startup.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In an interview, Altman didn\u2019t express concern over the competition from other companies. He thinks most biotech companies are conditioned to move too slowly and are generally \u201cbadly run.\u201d\u00a0 What\u2019s needed, he thinks, is an \u201cOpenAI-type effort\u201d in longevity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main thing for Retro is to be a really good bio startup, because that is a rare thing,\u201d says Altman. \u201cIt\u2019s combining great science and the resources of a big company with the spirit of a startup that gets things done. And that is the project for now.\u201c<\/svg> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Antonio Regalado<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When a startup called Retro Biosciences eased out of stealth mode in mid-2022, it announced it had secured $180 million to bankroll an audacious mission: to add 10 years to the average human life span. It had set up its headquarters in a raw warehouse space near San Francisco just the year before, bolting shipping<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":616016,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69164,2392,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-616015","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-altman","8":"category-invested","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}