# 🔬 The Coolest Diffusion Research Isn't in LLMs — Evan Feinberg & Sergey Edunov, Genesis Molecular AI

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/latent-space-ai-engineer/the-coolest-diffusion-research-isn-t-in-llms-evan-feinberg-sergey-edunov-genesis-molecular-ai
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/latent-space-ai-engineer/the-coolest-diffusion-research-isn-t-in-llms-evan-feinberg-sergey-edunov-genesis-molecular-ai.md
Podcast: [Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/latent-space-ai-engineer)
Published: 2026-07-01T14:42:39+00:00
Episode link: https://www.latent.space/p/the-coolest-diffusion-research-isnt
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/204393300/b666b202e46ea3ef2184bcc5371e5faa.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/latent-space-ai-engineer/episodes/the-coolest-diffusion-research-isn-t-in-llms-evan-feinberg-sergey-edunov-genesis-molecular-ai
Duration seconds: 6519

## Resource

This episode has a fun personal twist: There’s a counterfactual world where I was employee #1 at Genesis Molecular AI , the company behind today’s episode. A certain introduction happened a few weeks too late and I had already happily signed at Atomwise, another ML-for-drug-discovery startup. Same problem, different company. I was certain ML was going to transform small molecule drug discovery. Early results were underwhelming. Useful at times, but nowhere near revolutionary. In the last year I’ve seen signs that ML is finally ready to deliver on my convictions from a decade ago. Genesis is one of the places that might have finally cracked this problem. I was super excited to come full circle and catch up with co-founder Evan Feinberg and CTO Sergey Edunov . If you are at all interested in small molecule drug discovery, we think you will find this fascinating! In our nearly two hour chat we cover: * What is small molecule drug discovery, and why is it hard * Structure prediction as a hotbed of innovation in AI algorithms * How advances in AI elsewhere have enabled stepwise improvements in predictive power * How the community benchmarks are essentially calling AI slop good enough * The Genesis flagship model (PEARL) can routinely hit a threshold that is necessary for real-world applications * New agentic workflows enabled by these highly accurate models Read on for more, and also some personal thoughts on the future at the end. The coolest diffusion research is happening at Genesis Sergey Edunov came to Genesis from Meta where he led Llama 2 training and Llama 3 pretraining. Sergey was a former physicist who thought he was done with physics after many years of training LLMs. Then, he discovered Genesis, and was blown away with all the novel architecture work they’ve bee…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/latent-space-ai-engineer/episodes/the-coolest-diffusion-research-isn-t-in-llms-evan-feinberg-sergey-edunov-genesis-molecular-ai/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/latent-space-ai-engineer/the-coolest-diffusion-research-isn-t-in-llms-evan-feinberg-sergey-edunov-genesis-molecular-ai.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.