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Moonshots · 3 min · Oct 15, 2026

Curing disease is a path-planning search problem, not a mystery

Alexander Wissner-GrossHost

Founder, Reified

Has backed and advised 40+ tech companies, directly and through 021T Capital and Reified; writes The Innermost Loop.

  • Peter DiamandisHost · Founder, XPRIZE

    Co-founded Singularity University and founded Zero-G; co-wrote the books Abundance and Bold.

  • Salim IsmailHost · Founder, Open ExO

    Co-wrote Exponential Organizations; was Singularity University's founding executive director; sold Ångströ to Google.

  • Dave BlundinHost · Founder & GP, Link Ventures

    Has co-founded 23 companies; founding CEO of Vestmark and chairman of insurance marketplace EverQuote.

About this segment

Alex answers the claim that biology is too complex to bulk-solve like math. He frames curing disease as path planning from a diseased state to a healthy one, an AlphaGo-style search.

From “OpenAI Bulk-Solves 722 Math Problems, Anthropic’s Cruelty Policy, & Elon’s Quadrillion-Dollar SpaceX”, Oct 15, 2026. Watch the full episode

“I just want to like Google Maps my way from A to B through intervention space.”
Alexander Wissner-Grossat 1:10:04 · Moonshots1:10:04

Takeaways

  1. Biology is as vulnerable to bulk solving as math, with more data
  2. Model the full organism state, then search intervention paths
  3. A human digital twin enables a Move 37 moment for medicine
Watch 2:35 from 1:08:02

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 41:45Math is bulk-solved first because it is easiest to verify2:56
  2. 57:03In-silico cures for 5,000 diseases may arrive in 2 to 3 years1:50

  3. 1:08:02Curing disease is a path-planning search problem, not a mystery2:35

Up next · FoundersMeta bet on personal agents while rivals crowded into coding3:42

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:08:08

    prediction. So we could check back in in a few years and see whether it happened or not. A lot of people are saying, Alex, that, listen, math and coding are very confined sets of required actions, and biology is much more complicated. Yeah, I get that from time to time from people who are under-informed, call them that, who say, oh, what just happened in math? Biology is so different. Oh, we're so well insulated from mere stochastic parrots that speak math.

  2. 1:08:37

    Wrong. Incorrect. Biology is just as vulnerable to being disrupted and bulk solved and cooked as math is. Just because the language of biology, to the extent it has a language, appears more complicated, does not protect it at all from bulk disruption. Biology will be bulk solved just as easily, if not more easily, than math. It's simply the case that there is probably more data and higher dimensionality associated with it.

  3. 1:09:05

    With math, you can, for example, state, say, Fermat's last theorem with relatively few number of tokens. It's a very simple, easy-to-pose problem with, at least at the moment, the best proof that we have is relatively long token-wise for that. With biology, one could imagine in a few years you pose a disease, a disease task. Pick disease, X, Y, Z. You encode the start state, which is a disease state.

  4. 1:09:31

    Presumably it's some sort of phenotypic state combined with a proteomic state, combined with an epigenetic state, combined with dot, dot, dot. So you have like a full state of the human organism in that diseased state or maybe it's some subspace thereof. And then the task is how do you start from that diseased person state and how do you intervention path plan your way from a diseased person state to a healthy subspace person state?

  5. 1:09:58

    That's just path planning. That's like. AlphaGo, there's going to be a Move 37 way once we have a suitable human organismic level digital twin to say, I have this model of a human. I just want to like Google Maps my way from A to B through intervention space. How do I, you know, turn left and then turn right, take this pill, then take this pill, then climb this, you know, hill to get from A to B and the AI will solve.

  6. 1:10:25

    That's just a search problem. So AI will solve the search problem in, I think, next two to three years. This is our last podcast. There was a bit of news that was important.