In partnership with

In this week’s newsletter

✅ Introduction to episode 22 with Prof. Derya Unutmaz. ✅ Detailed show notes.  ✅ Modeling entire biological systems in silico. ✅ Why “Don’t die” is no longer a joke. ✅ Why Derya is on Team Hassabis. ✅ How digital twins could revolutionize diagnosis and treatment.

🤙🏼 Want to connect? Add me on LinkedIn. 🙏🏼 Not subscribed to the LEVITY podcast on Youtube yet? Do it here. 🎧 More of a listener? The LEVITY podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other places.

Stay up-to-date with AI

The Rundown is the most trusted AI newsletter in the world, with 1,000,000+ readers and exclusive interviews with AI leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Demis Hassibis, Mustafa Suleyman, and more.

Their expert research team spends all day learning what’s new in AI and talking with industry experts, then distills the most important developments into one free email every morning.

Plus, complete the quiz after signing up and they’ll recommend the best AI tools, guides, and courses – tailored to your needs.

Sign up to start learning.

Some housekeeping:

🤖 I was offered the chance to run an ad for The Rundown (see above). And while we're on the topic of AI newsletters, I also want to recommend my two absolute favorites: The Algorithmic Bridge by Alberto Romero and One Useful Thing by Ethan Mollick.

If The Rundown tells you what happened, then The Algorithmic Bridge and One Useful Thing tell you why it matters.

⏰ For reasons a little out of my control I’m running a bit late with the next installment in the Longevity Builders series. Hopefully I’ll be able to send it to you later this week.

How AI will help us solve aging - soon

Lately, there's been growing pushback against the idea that AI will transform geroscience in the short term. When Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis told 60 Minutes that AI could help cure every disease within 5–10 years, many in the longevity and biotech communities scoffed. Leading aging biologists called it wishful thinking - or outright fantasy.

They argue that we still lack crucial biological data to train AI models, and that experiments and clinical trials move too slowly to change the timeline.

Our guest in this episode of LEVITY, Professor Derya Unutmaz, knows these objections well. But he’s firmly on Team Hassabis.

In fact, Unutmaz goes even further. He says we won’t just cure diseases - we'll solve aging itself within the next 20 years.

And best of all, he offers a surprisingly detailed, concrete explanation of how it will happen: building virtual cells, modeling entire biological systems in silico, and dramatically accelerating drug discovery - powered by next-generation AI reasoning engines.

🧬 In this wide-ranging conversation, we also cover:

✅ Why biological complexity is no longer an unsolvable barrier.

✅ How digital twins could revolutionize diagnosis and treatment.

✅ Why clinical trials as we know them may soon collapse.

✅ The accelerating timeline toward longevity escape velocity.

✅ How reasoning AIs (like GPT-4o, o1, DeepSeek) are changing scientific research.

✅ Whether AI creativity challenges the idea that only biological minds can create.

✅ Why AI will force a new culture of leisure, curiosity, and human flourishing.

✅ The existential stress that will come as AI outperforms human expertise.

✅ Why “Don’t die” is no longer a joke — it's real advice.

🎙️ Hosted - as always - by me, Peter Ottsjö (tech journalist and author of Evigt Ung), and Dr. Patrick Linden (philosopher and author of The Case Against Death).

You can watch the episode below or listen to it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or other places, like PocketCasts. Please follow, like and subscribe! 🙏🏼 This will boost our chances of reaching a bigger audience.

A detailed overview of the episode

Opening & first impressions

• Host intro – Peter Ottsjö welcomes Prof. Derya Unutmaz.

• Name trivia – In Turkish Derya means “big sea / ocean.”

• Social proof – Peter notes the guest has just crossed 300 000 followers on X.

  • Derya’s “secret sauce”: “I pretty much say what I think. I guess people like that I'm sincere in my thoughts. I don't have a particular agenda. I really want to sort of educate the public.”

Snapshot of Derya’s career

• Current role: Professor of Immunology at The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) in Connecticut.

• Past posts: Full professor at NYU School of Medicine; earlier faculty at Vanderbilt.

• One of a few scientists holding an OpenAI research grant on AI-for-healthcare.

• Tone-setter: Derya says he’s “optimistic by nature,” heavily influenced by classic science-fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

Why the immune system is central to aging

• 30-year focus on immunity: HIV, cancer immunotherapy, chronic-fatigue syndrome.

• Analogy: the immune system is “your army, police, firefighters and garbage collectors.”

• Inflammation flagged as a hallmark of aging.

  • First saw the link in HIV patients whose immune systems aged “10-15 years faster.”

  • Key quote: “There's no question that inflammation, chronic inflammation, is one of the worst problems of health.”

A former “hacker” meets modern AI

• Teenage years spent with gaming computers such as Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga 500; co-founded Turkey’s first Amiga “hacker club.”

• Early AI inspiration: Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Intelligent Machines, and Marvin Minsky.

• Ran the first AI club at JAX a decade ago (long before ChatGPT).

• Milestones that convinced him AI would reshape biology:

  1. “Attention Is All You Need” (2017 Transformers paper) – showed how language models work.

  2. AlphaFold (2020) – AI solved 3D structures of every human protein, a task that used to take PhD students years.

  3. AlphaGo (2016) – Move 37 against world champion Lee Sedol: proof AI can out-strategise humans in complex systems [I’ll embed the great documentary about this fight between man and machine below].

• First tried GPT-3 in 2022; reaction: “I was just blown away.”

From “autocomplete” to “reasoning” models

• Derya explains the jump from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4o and the new “o-series” (OpenAI’s reasoning models) using Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 / System 2 analogy.

  • Old models felt like fast, reflexive thinking; new ones show deliberate, step-by-step reasoning.

• Mentions DeepSeek (Chinese open-source LLM) because it exposes its full chain-of-thought. [Note: we recorded this in January 2025. Since then many other models also show their “thinking”.]

Creativity & the path to AGI

• Question from co-host Patrick Linden: “Are we already at machine creativity?”

  • Derya: Today’s models are “better than 80 % of people” at creative tasks but not yet Einstein-level.

  • Two-year-old self-doubt now gone: machines don’t need biology to be creative - scaling alone may be enough (idea credited to Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI).

• Dates the recording: 30 Jan 2025; points out predictions age quickly in AI.

• Touches on Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near -technology curves are so steep we can’t see even six months ahead.

Society under “creative disruption”

• Quotes Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and Yann LeCun (Meta) on AGI timelines - each shortening their estimates.

• Dario’s line that AI will outperform humans at all jobs by 2027 - Derya calls this a looming “COVID × 100” stress event.

• Philosophical touchstone: Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence (and lesser-known Deep Utopia).

  • Derya believes leaders underplay progress to avoid public backlash.

Medicine today: AI already saves lives

• September 2024: Derya posted a blunt warning to aspiring physicians—“re-think med-school”.

• Argues it is now unethical for doctors not to consult AI because:

  • US statistics: 12 million misdiagnoses yearly; 250 000 avoidable deaths.

  • Large models outperform doctors on many diagnostic tasks. [Also check out this Nature study, published after our recording.]

• Personal proof-points:

  • Drafted an entire patent in two hours with GPT-4o; a patent lawyer said it needed no edits.

  • Taught his mother to run her symptoms through ChatGPT first: “She says she doesn’t need me anymore.”

Education, identity & “existential stress”

• Traditional higher-ed questioned: once AI tutors exist, universities become networking hubs rather than knowledge gatekeepers.

• Patrick notes that careers and self-worth are tied to scarce skills; AI abundance triggers identity crises.

• Derya’s pragmatic advice to students: only pursue long training if you’re confident you’ll be in the top 10 % of the field.

The “AI pause” debate

• Names the pause camp: Max Tegmark, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Yuval Noah Harari, Elon Musk.

• Derya’s counter-position:

  • Pausing won’t help; super-intelligence risk can’t be modelled in advance.

  • Every day of delay postpones cures for cancer, dementia, aging. “The moment we're born, we're destined to die. There is no other existential risk than that.”

  • Humans misuse tools; the solution is alignment research in parallel, not a moratorium.

Longevity forecasts & the “virtual cell” vision

• Bet with Gary Marcus: average human lifespan will hit 95+ years within 20 years, and longevity escape velocity will be reached.

• Pathway:

  1. Single-cell ‘omics experiments already generate millions of datapoints per run.

  2. Feed that into AI to build a digital-twin / virtual-cell model.

  3. In-silico screening finds the best drug for your biology in hours.

  4. Clinical testing collapses from years to days; FDA becomes an AI audit.

• Exponential story told via the “rice on a chessboard” parable (doubling grains reach 380 billion tonnes by square 64).

• Predicts we will look back on cancer and dementia like we view pre-antibiotic infections today.

  [Note: in this part of the podcast I mention a book and the early version of antibiotics, but can’t remember the name. The excellent book is called The Demon Under the Microscope and the compound is called sulfanilamide - or just “sulfa”.]

Community & upcoming events

• Vitalist Bay – 8-week longevity zone in Berkeley. Derya will speak on immune-system rejuvenation via AI and open science at Vitalist Bay’s AI × Biology Workshop, 9-10 May 2025. And co-host Patrick Linden will be at the Longevity Policy Conference 2025 at Vitalist Bay May 24-25.

• Shout-out to the Longevity Biotech Fellowship for its retreats that turn enthusiasts into founders.

• Catch-phrase from bio-hacker Bryan Johnson: “Don’t die.” Derya endorses it literally.

Booklist

1. Ray Kurzweil – The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990)

2. Ray Kurzweil – The Singularity Is Near (2005)

3. Neal Stephenson – Snow Crash (1992) – coined “metaverse.”

4. David Deutsch – The Fabric of Reality (1997) – four threads of everything.

5. Nick Bostrom – Superintelligence (2014) & Deep Utopia (2022)

6. Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)