AI-fo­cused biotech in­vestors have to be com­fort­able plac­ing bets in a fast-mov­ing space.

End­points News’ re­cent con­ver­sa­tion with Dy­lan Reid, an ear­ly-stage in­vestor at Zetta Ven­ture Part­ners, un­in­ten­tion­al­ly be­came yet an­oth­er ex­am­ple of just how fast things are mov­ing in AI.

Reid, who has made in­vest­ments in AI biotechs like Noetik, Nabla Bio and Ax­iom, dropped in­to our se­cret Slack room last Wednes­day. We chat­ted about new re­search from Ope­nAI eval­u­at­ing biose­cu­ri­ty risks with large lan­guage mod­els. The Ope­nAI pa­per came out Tues­day, but by Fri­day, Ope­nAI was al­ready on­to the next big thing and un­veil­ing its lat­est mod­el, GPT-5.

We al­so got in­to Rei­d's thoughts on the di­ver­gence be­tween the tasks AI is per­form­ing best at to­day — and the tasks that would un­lock the most val­ue. Read on for the full con­ver­sa­tion, which has been min­i­mal­ly edit­ed for clar­i­ty and ty­pos.

It's been six months since a drug de­vel­op­er went pub­lic on the US stock ex­changes.

The last IPO was Feb. 13, when Aard­vark Ther­a­peu­tics de­buted on the Nas­daq. Its share price AARD is about 30% low­er to­day.

This is one of the longest biotech IPO dry spells since the Great Re­ces­sion, when 21 months sep­a­rat­ed Wall Street list­ings for bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies. Iron­i­cal­ly, that lull end­ed 16 years ago on a day in Au­gust.

By com­par­i­son, there were more than 50 biotech IPOs from Feb. 13 to Aug. 13 in 2021, when it felt like near­ly any com­pa­ny could land a tick­er.

How­ev­er, many in­vestors were burned dur­ing that pe­ri­od, and in­dus­try lead­ers agreed that the pace was un­sus­tain­able. Some com­pa­nies that went pub­lic in the pan­dem­ic gold rush have since shut­tered, in­clud­ing Omega Ther­a­peu­tics. Oth­ers were ac­quired, like Am­brx Bio­phar­ma (by John­son & John­son) and Verve Ther­a­peu­tics (by Eli Lil­ly).

Hat­teras Ven­ture Part­ners has closed two in­vest­ment funds, with more than $200 mil­lion in com­mit­ments, the firm said Wednes­day morn­ing.

The clos­ing in­cludes about $177 mil­lion for the firm’s sev­enth ven­ture fund and about $30 mil­lion for a so-called op­por­tu­ni­ty fund that in­vests in lat­er-stage rounds of ex­ist­ing port­fo­lio com­pa­nies, gen­er­al part­ner Clay Thorp told End­points News.

The ven­ture fund is the largest in the firm’s 25-year his­to­ry, Thorp said. Hat­teras’ pri­or ven­ture fund, a 2019 vin­tage, col­lect­ed $138 mil­lion, he added. Its lim­it­ed part­ners in­clude un­named en­dow­ments, pen­sion funds, strate­gics, fam­i­ly of­fices and oth­ers.

Durham, NC-based Hat­teras in­vests about 45% to 50% of its funds in biotech star­tups, about 30% in med­ical tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies and the re­main­der in health tech, Thorp said. The firm is some­times one of the ear­li­est checks in a start­up’s life and has tra­di­tion­al­ly fo­cused on ear­ly-stage in­vest­ing, he added.

Plus, news about Gen­er­a­tion Bio, Re­sponse Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, Jo­cas­ta Neu­ro­science, Oric, ALX On­col­o­gy, Fate Ther­a­peu­tics, X4 Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and Ar­ma­ta:

🧭 Com­pass The