Sam Altman Invests Entire Liquid Assets in Anti-Aging Company Retro Biosciences
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has invested all of his liquid net assets into Retro Biosciences for research on partial cellular reprogramming to reverse aging. The company has completed an $180 million seed round and an additional $1 billion Series A round, currently valuing the company at $5 billion.
Retro has redesigned Yamanaka factor-related proteins using a custom GPT-4b micro model from OpenAI, increasing cellular reprogramming efficiency by 50 times (from 3 weeks to 7 days) and has initiated human trials for Alzheimer's disease drugs.
Investors in longevity technology and medical AI are pursuing anti-aging projects, with Altman accelerating biological research through OpenAI's computing power and proprietary models. Retro Biosciences and AI+medical platforms benefit, while traditional drug development pipelines face short-term pressure, with funding shifting from single-disease treatments to a foundational platform for cellular rejuvenation.
Source: Public Information
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Sam Altman has previously invested in several longevity companies, including Altman Labs. This time, he has bet all his liquid funds on Retro and requested OpenAI to customize a dedicated model for him, continuing his path from the commercialization of ChatGPT to directly driving cutting-edge biological research. The original method of Yamanaka factors, which won the Nobel Prize, is highly inefficient, and AI protein design has achieved breakthrough acceleration.
In terms of capital, Altman is directly injecting OpenAI's technological resources and personal wealth into Retro, reshaping the protein design process through proprietary models like GPT-4b micro, while also promoting GPT-5 to enhance medical query capabilities. His motivation is to transform AI from a general tool into a biological science accelerator, forming a vertically integrated closed loop from model training data to clinical trials, seizing the first-mover advantage in the longevity sector.
Similar to Bezos's investment in Altos Labs and other longevity projects supported by Zuckerberg and Thiel, which remain in early stages, Altman is currently positioning Retro at the forefront of AI-driven cellular reprogramming, pushing the longevity industry from traditional small molecule drugs to a large-scale transformation phase aided by AI-assisted partial reprogramming.
Structural judgment: Essentially a technological replacement. AI, through customized protein design and large-scale computation, replaces human trial-and-error iterations in biological experiments with rapid directional optimization. The mechanism lies in the model's ability to explore over 100 amino acid mutation spaces that human scientists dare not attempt, forcing the value of longevity to concentrate from dispersed traditional pharma pipelines to platforms mastering AI and cellular reprogramming.
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