You may have learnt about Ailurus from our initial services to address protein engineering related problems. However, many people may not know that our longer-term plan is to build biocomputers for you. Wait, why would I want a "biocomputer"? What the heck is it?

Let's talk about why first. I simply wanted one so I could have a new way to do biology, because the old solution sucks. When I started to work on synthetic biology as a kid, a bright future was often described where biology would be easily programmed as electronic computers. Yet, 15 years later, this comparison remains a metaphor. People still need a large labspace, fancy equipment, PhD-level scientists, and the labwork is notoriously slow, tedious, expensive, and unpredictable. In contrast, a high school student could do great phone apps with a laptop.

We shall not settle for this status quo. Biology is so powerful but our tools are so rusty. I believe biology can be a general purpose technology (GPT) that reshapes the entire economy and humanity. It is not only about making drugs and building materials, but also the foundation of intelligence, mortality, planetary climate and many more. If we master it, we could program reality with programming biology, and eventually build "god".With this mission, I cofounded Ailurus Bio in 2020, and tried to find a path towards it.

The biocomputer, I believe, will be the primary solution. The concept was coined in 1990s, meaning using biological materials to perform computation. We think its generalization has great potential. In many cases, the best way to solve a biological problem is through another living system. It may sound abstract and far-fetched, but in fact, many biological reactions have been widely used for computing. For instance, PCR tests can be considered specifically purposed "biocomputer" to quantify viruses.

Our work is to generalize the idea of biocomputing for most common tasks, by designing cells and living systems that can act as micro labs. With these living devices for most R&D and production tasks, and electronics to perform traditional software and AIs, we could foresee a hybrid solution that streamlines the entire process in a single automated machine, one stand-alone biocomputer. Imagine, if you have a desktop box that contains all functions you need for a lab, it can be a plate reader, a sequencer, a bioreactor, et cetera, according to the code you input, then bioengineering would literally become a programming discipline.

Well, we cannot build Rome in a day. In the beginning, our tech still requires normal lab and human intervention to complete a project, but already offers unparalleled efficiency in many perspectives. Thus, we start with providing "cloud-lab services" to the users. In return, real-world requests and feedback will help us reframe the architecture better and faster. When someone uses Ailurus cloud-lab services, they are actually codesigning the next-generation biocomputers with us.

I hope we won't stay as a "service company" for long. Once a minimally viable system can be fully automated, even with limited capabilities, we will start to package it into a machine. So more users could apply them at a more affordable price in-house, and even design new "living algorithms" by themselves. As these biocomputers generate more and more data, we would gain knowledge to design better biocomputers to meet a wider range of requests. Eventually, we believe it will lead us to programming biology as a GPT.

So, in summary, our master plan is:

1. Build a semi-automated, lab-size biocomputer that can provide services
2. Build a stand-alone, desktop biocomputer for general purposes
3. Make biology a general-purpose technology

Now let's start to build a god.