Not Another Chatbot: Astromech’s “Large Life Model” Aims to Decode Biology’s Hidden Code
The future of artificial intelligence may not be conversational. It may be biological.
While most of the tech world is optimizing large language models to make machines sound more human, Astromech—a stealth AI company co-founded by TIME100 Next honoree Ben Lamm—appears to be working on something altogether different: a Large Life Model. If LLMs like ChatGPT are designed to simulate language, this one is seemingly built to simulate life.
From what we can gather, Astromech isn’t trying to make headlines. Its website offers no demos, no product roadmap, no investor decks—just a flickering interface that outlines a mission to build a new kind of AI system. “At the heart of Astromech is a mission to construct the Large Life Model,” one screen reads. The rest hints at a generative biological architecture capable of ingesting multi-species data, incorporating ancestral reconstruction, and producing a “continuously updating biological intelligence layer.”
It’s dense, cryptic, and full of sci-fi overtones—but there’s substance under the stylization. Based on the language Astromech uses, the Large Life Model seems purpose-built to decode the regulatory and evolutionary logic of biology—not just to predict outcomes, but to navigate them. Terms like genomic inference, trait optimization, and causal structures appear across public-facing copy, suggesting a system that moves beyond sequence analysis toward something more integrative: a kind of AI that could, in theory, simulate how traits evolve or respond across biological environments.
Unlike traditional LLMs trained on text, Astromech’s system may be ingesting transcriptomic and epigenetic data, lineage-based annotations, and ancient DNA—though none of this has been confirmed. Its outputs wouldn’t be paragraphs or prompts, but models of life as it was, and life as it could be.
What the company is building—and how far along they are—is unclear. But based on publicly available SEC filings, we know Astromech has secured $30 million in funding. That kind of capital suggests the idea is resonating with backers who believe biology’s complexity requires not just more wet labs, but better reasoning engines.
This also aligns with co-founder Ben Lamm’s broader trajectory. As the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, Lamm has led a string of high-profile de-extinction projects—from woolly mammoths to the recently announced plans to revive the South Island giant moa. Astromech could be the infrastructural counterpart to those efforts: a generative biological model that complements Colossal’s empirical ambitions.
To be clear, no one outside the company knows what Astromech’s “Large Life Model” will ultimately do—or how it might be used. But its framing suggests a system trained not only to model life, but to reason through it. This would mark a shift in how we approach biological intelligence: not just sequencing what is, but simulating what was, and imagining what could be.
Whether the Large Life Model becomes a platform for researchers, a commercial discovery engine, or simply a high-concept R&D layer inside Colossal remains to be seen. For now, the message is intentionally minimal. But if the goal is what it appears to be—an AI system capable of navigating evolution’s logic—Astromech might be less interested in joining the AI arms race, and more interested in building the next substrate beneath it.
