In this episode, we explore the frontiers of AI research with Eric Xing, President of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and founder of GenBio AI. A pioneer in AI Biology, Eric discusses the evolving landscape of world models, agentic AI, and the revolutionary concept of AI-driven digital organisms. With a background that spans computational biology, large-scale ML systems, and foundational research, Eric provides deep insights into how AI is transforming our understanding of intelligence, life, and scientific simulation.

Key Topics Covered

• Defining World Models: What they are, how they differ from generative models, and why they are essential for reasoning and simulation.
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• The Role of World Models in Agentic AI: How simulation and planning rely on internal representations of environments.
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• Why Digital Agents Still Need World Models: Even in digital workflows, world models help with decision-making, abstraction, and tool interaction.
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• Agent Models and Autonomous Reasoning: The limitations of step-by-step optimization and the need for scenario simulation.
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• AI Biology and GenBio AI’s Vision:
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• Introducing the concept of the AI-Driven Digital Organism (AIDO).
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• Multiscale foundation models for DNA, RNA, proteins, and cells.
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• Simulating biology to replace expensive and slow wet-lab experimentation.
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• Challenges in Modeling Life:
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• Why LLM-style architectures don’t work for biology.
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• The need for multimodal, co-trained, interpretable architectures.
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• Explainability in AI Biology: How modular architectures and simulation-based evaluation can help bridge the gap.
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• Ethical Boundaries and Societal Readiness: Why AI progress is bounded by what society is ready and willing to adopt.

Memorable Outtakes

“World models are simulators of all possibilities—not just in the physical world, but also in mental and cyber spaces.”

– Eric Xing, on expanding the scope of simulation in AI.

“We want to build a virtual cell—or an AI-driven digital organism—that can simulate biology at any scale.”

– Eric Xing, explaining the core vision of AI Biology and how it's redefining biological modeling.

“In biology, the research is still done in the wet lab. We want to replace that with a digital system that simulates all plausible hypotheses.”

– Eric Xing, on the need to digitize the discovery phase in medicine and drug development.

References & Resources Mentioned

• Eric Xing on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-xing-a6900418/
• GenBio AI: https://genbio.ai
• MBZUAI (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence): https://mbzuai.ac.ae
• DeepMind Gemini Robotics: https://deepmind.google/technologies/gemini
• Broad Institute: https://www.broadinstitute.org
• David Ha & Jürgen Schmidhuber “World Models” paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10122
• Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/12/1170123/fei-fei-li-world-models-startup/
• Eric’s ODSC East Keynote Session, “Toward Public and Reproducible Foundation Models Beyond Lingual Intelligence”: https://odsc.com/speakers/toward-public-and-reproducible-foundation-models-beyond-lingual-intelligence/

Sponsored by

This episode was sponsored by:

🎤 ODSC East 2025 – The Leading AI Builders Conference – https://odsc.com/boston/

Join us from May 13th to 15th in Boston for hands-on workshops, training sessions, and cutting-edge AI talks covering generative AI, LLMOps, and AI-driven automation.

🔥 Use the exclusive code ODSCPodcast for an additional 10% off any ticket type!