Biohub Head of Science Alex Rives on Virtual Cell Limitations and the $1.8B Data Push

In the latest episode of the Cognitive Revolution podcast, host Nathan Labenz interviews Alex Rives, Head of Science at Biohub. Rives, who started the ESM protein language model project at Meta's Fundamental AI Research lab and co-founded EvolutionaryScale, discusses the core challenges of AI in biology: why current "virtual cell" models haven't revolutionized medicine, and how a $1.8 billion international data initiative attempts to solve this.

Rives frankly states that today's models called virtual cells do not meet the definition of being able to meaningfully simulate a cell. He argues that progress requires three things simultaneously: a better modeling paradigm (since Transformers lack the multi-scale structure a cell demands), data at scale, and most fundamentally, new tools to observe and measure what matters. He emphasizes that the biggest difference between biology and other AI domains is how limited our ability to observe it still is.

To address this data bottleneck, Biohub launched the Virtual Biology Initiative in April 2026, recently expanding it to $1.8 billion. The plan brings together the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, and Meta. Rives notes that the roadmap will emphasize contextual maps of cellular biology, including spatial biology that links molecular measurements to imaging at the scale of hundreds of billions of cells.