Not all AI companies want to slow down.

Chris Butler, who runs drug discovery at Isomorphic Labs, the Google-backed drug company started by DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, pushed back against the suggestion that calls by OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI leaders to pace the frontier would slow his company down.

“We’re able to still progress regardless of what decisions are made elsewhere,” Butler said at the Semafor Future of Health Forum on Tuesday.

“All of our AI models are locked down and locked down in-house,” he added. “So, really, for us, it’s about, how do we use the models that we’ve built internally to help to accelerate the drug discovery process.”

Isomorphic, which was founded in 2021 as a DeepMind spinoff, raised $2.1 billion in its latest funding round in May, led by Thrive Capital, at an undisclosed valuation. It’s planning on plunging that money to help build out its pipeline and evolve its overall drug design; its drug discovery team is growing, with particular interest in oncology and immunology. “It is really important that we continue to see that progress toward the clinic,” he told Semafor’s healthcare reporter David Lim.