Episode
Inside the AI used by Sam Altman’s $1B+ longevity startup - Rico Meinl, Head of Applied AI at Retro Bio
- Podcast
- Free Radicals
- Published
- Mar 10, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4561
- Processing state
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Summary
Retro Biosciences was seeded with $180M by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to develop therapies to prevent and reverse age-related disease, and is widely recognized as one of the leading AI for longevity companies. Today’s guest is Rico Meinl, the Head of Applied AI at Retro Biosciences. In this episode, we discuss Retro’s work with OpenAI to engineer 50x more effective Yamanaka factors, what it means to build foundation models that can reason across natural language and protein sequence, and why the bottlenecks in biology are more experimental than computational. We also get into the biology of aging and how AI can enable therapies that dramatically advance healthy lifespan.