The Future is Open

Come rebuild the machinery of science for our abundant future

The coming years will bring an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advancement. Exponential progress in artificial intelligence is converging with central advances in other key fields to dramatically accelerate the pace of innovation across virtually all domains. This inflection point provides an unparalleled opportunity – and an urgent mandate – to fundamentally rethink the institutions, systems, and tools that drive scientific progress.

At Astera, we want to meet this challenge by seeding a vibrant ecosystem of mission-driven, open-source products and organizations. We aim to play a leading role in the transition to a shared and abundant future by experimenting with unexplored approaches, embracing scientific and technical risk, and leveraging our $2.5 billion endowment to chase impact at scale. As we embark on a period of rapid growth over the coming year, we are building a world-class team to execute on this ambitious vision.

The Approaching horizon

The next decade will be the fastest period of scientific and technological progress in history (so far). The case in brief:

Exponential growth in computing power and AI capabilities. We are reaching a tipping point where advanced AI will increasingly augment and accelerate research and innovation across virtually all domains. As the world wakes up to the revolutionary potential of machine learning, an increasingly large fraction of global wealth, chip manufacturing capacity, and energy production will be plowed into further acceleration.

Growing automation of science and engineering. Progress in high-throughput science, robotics, computer vision, materials simulation, computational biology, and other tools are allowing more steps of the research, development, and deployment process to be automated. In the near future, we will likely see large-scale efforts to replace the still-firmly-human planning components of science with autonomous systems.

Convergence of multiple maturing technologies. Fields like genomics, synthetic biology, immunology, structural biology, materials science, renewable energy, neurotech, and quantum computing are now reaching key milestones. The next decade will likely see the combination and synthesis of these advancing technologies in powerful ways that will reshape many aspects of society.

Scientific knowledge and data growth. The proliferation of sensors, storage, and data analytics have fueled rapid growth in the amount of scientific data available to fuel breakthroughs. This trend will accelerate dramatically as algorithmic and compute advances in ML mean progress is increasingly bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality data, and resources are increasingly allocated to its collection or synthesis.

As the horizon nears, we should not expect our old assumptions about how prosperity is converted into scientific progress to hold – or vice versa. By default, transformative change in the above areas is likely to be largely driven by private investment. Given Astera’s risk tolerance, institutional agility, and substantial resources, we believe we’re in a unique position to keep pace with the leading edge of technological development. Government and other institutions will take more time to adapt, but we can be partners for speeding this up by charting a path.

Our Vision

We believe:

  1. Abundance is nigh. AI is on the verge of explosive growth. (Scientific) productive capacity is on the verge of explosive growth. At a civilizational scale, we are about to get much wealthier, very fast.
  2. Science is ripe for transformation. There are huge opportunities to channel research in high-leverage directions, to coordinate at large scales, to improve the way scientific funding is deployed, and to ensure that scientific knowledge is widely shared. We must rethink these core aspects of science holistically, as they are interdependent.
  3. We are at the crossroads. Our transition to a scientifically advanced future can go two ways: extension and entrenchment of existing systems, or replacement. The next 5-10 years are disproportionately likely to be the critical period for shifting the future of science in one direction or the other. This is our best chance to create new, more rational systems and approaches, and we must act with urgency to bring them about.

In order to navigate this period of dramatic change and to pave the way for a shared, scientifically advanced future, we need to rebuild the machinery of science. Astera’s mission is to contribute to this project by supporting the creation of public goods to accelerate scientific and technological progress – goods like non-proprietary infrastructure, tools, datasets, playbooks, and standards. Given the novelty of emerging technologies and unknowns about the future, we believe more experimentation around these public goods is needed to develop conviction about what will work. We hope to provide a dedicated space for this exploration. We want to help make science better, faster, and cheaper, while ensuring that everyone participates in its benefits.

Three Examples

1. Data-Centric Publishing
To take advantage of new computational tools that can increase the pace of scientific progress, reduce bias, and root out fraud, we must shift from narrative-centric to data-centric approaches to sharing scientific results. This requires establishing robust infrastructure, tools, platforms, and best practices around metadata and data formats to facilitate data-sharing and analysis.

We can also leverage a shift toward data-centric publishing to transform meta-analysis. Currently, conducting a large meta-review takes multiple years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the result is a static product that needs to be regenerated from scratch if new data comes to light. We can build infrastructure to make meta-reviews 2 OOM faster, 2 OOM cheaper, auditable, and automatically updatable.

These changes could allow us to transition from a system where meta-reviews are tools for summarizing existing evidence on directed topics to one where they can systematically identify holes in our scientific understanding. This will allow us to design for impact – to target studies to the highest-leverage questions – rather than evaluating it post hoc via guess-and-check methods. We believe we can reduce fraud and publication bias in the process, by designing studies where negative results update our understanding as much as positive ones.

2. Open Datasets
Machine learning will be key to rapid advancement in many areas of science, and datasets are the key to realizing the potential of machine learning. Biological and physical systems often involve complex, non-linear interactions across multiple scales. Machine learning models, especially deep neural networks, require vast amounts of training data to learn patterns and make accurate predictions. In the life sciences, this could include genomic data, medical images, and clinical trial results. In the physical sciences, it includes data from experiments, simulations, sensor networks, and observations. The larger and more comprehensive these datasets, the more accurate and robust the AI models can become.

Trying to harvest the necessary datasets from publicly available sources is not currently possible. This is due in large part to heterogeneous data formats, uneven availability, incomplete metadata, and an absence of cohesive, shared infrastructure. It is also exacerbated by current predominant publishing practices and culture, which emerged from a vastly different technological landscape and throughput of information. There is a well-known bias in scientific publishing toward positive, novel results. Studies that fail to reject the null hypothesis, replicate prior findings, or report negative results are much less likely to be published. This “file drawer problem” means that the published literature, and datasets derived from it, can paint a skewed picture of reality by overemphasizing certain findings and underrepresenting others. 

In order to harness the power of machine learning and other modern technologies, it will be necessary to create large, high-quality, publicly available datasets that overcome these challenges. This task cannot be left to the devices of companies building proprietary repositories that will be shared with a select few. We plan to contribute to this project at Astera by supporting the generation, collection, or collation of open datasets across many scientific domains by a variety of means. We believe this is the path to a more rigorous, innovative, scalable, and participatory scientific ecosystem.

3. Open-Source Translational Science
Emerging technologies such as synthetic biology hold immense promise to transform industries and address global challenges, but their progress is often hampered by a lack of accessible, scalable, and interoperable infrastructure. Many of the tools, datasets, and platforms necessary to unlock exponential advances in these fields are proprietary, siloed, or not yet developed. This limits the ability of researchers to collaborate, build on each other’s work, and translate scientific breakthroughs into real-world applications.

To help tackle this challenge, we plan to launch programming to accelerate the development and adoption of open-source infrastructure for emerging technologies. We will provide funding, resources, and support for experienced entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists to create and collaborate on projects aimed at creating critical public goods for these fields. In synthetic biology, this might include the development of open-source hardware, software, and wetware that address key bottlenecks in scaling and commercialization.

By bringing together the creativity of entrepreneurial minds with our resources and network, we hope to catalyze a new era of open innovation in emerging technologies. The resulting work will enable researchers around the world to more efficiently design, build, test, and scale cutting-edge solutions, unlocking the potential of these fields to revolutionize various sectors. Importantly, the open nature of these tools and platforms will ensure that the benefits of technological advances are accessible to a wide range of stakeholders, rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few.

Our Approach

Astera has two primary focuses for the next 12 months:

  1. massively scaling our new residency program to support dozens of projects tackling core structural problems in science and technology
  2. transitioning to a model where we are leveraging a significant portion of our endowment in service of such innovations

Our residency program will provide unprecedented support for talented, agentic scientists excited to develop public goods for science and technology. All of the outputs generated during the course of such residencies will be fully open and non-proprietary. We will, however, assist residents in launching a full range of projects and organizations based on their work, including for-profit ones, after they “graduate.” Our North Star is impact, which requires agnosticism regarding a project’s ultimate non- versus for-profit status to ensure financial sustainability and potential to scale.

The opportunity for residents will include: a salary for one year to investigate an important problem and potential solutions; additional funding for a team, lab, licenses, or whatever else is appropriate after a solution worth exploring has been identified; an incubation program providing training in how to be a scientist-entrepreneur; access to our fundraising networks and opportunities to pitch us and others for follow-on funding; and the chance to join a community of exceptionally talented individuals operating in an environment optimized for experimentation, collaboration, and the pursuit of ambitious projects for the benefit of humanity.

Simultaneously, we are reimagining our approach to using our $2.5 billion endowment by shifting from a model heavily skewed toward maximizing returns to one also designed to generate significant impact in service of our vision and principles. We will have more to share on this as we develop our strategy with our new team in the coming months.

Call to arms

Astera is now hiring the core team that will execute on this vision. We are looking for curious, impact-driven leaders passionate about our mission of creating public goods to advance science and technology. As we significantly scale our operations, our executive team will need to maintain a bias toward action through uncertainty, heavy experimentation, and possibly frequent pivots in approach. Excitement for fast, iterative learning and continuous improvement is a must.

We are hiring:

If none of these roles is the right fit for you, but you have a clear idea for one that should exist, please submit your CV and no more than a paragraph on the role you’re interested in via our General Application. Please join our mailing list for future announcements, including upcoming calls for applications to the residency program.

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At Astera, we believe an abundant future for all is possible – but not inevitable. To bring it about, we must rebuild the machinery of science to be more efficient, scalable, and open. We need visionary leaders who are compelled by the challenge of leveraging all the resources at our disposal to drive transformative change in the way science is funded, conducted, and communicated.

This is a call to the bold, brilliant, and mission-driven – to all who dream of a better scientific future for humanity. Come be a part of remaking science at Astera, whether as a core team member shaping our strategy, a resident working on groundbreaking public goods, or an impact investor helping us find the highest-leveraged bets.

The future is open.