Michael Polansky is training AI on skin that's still alive

Michael Polansky, the 27-year-old founder of Inherent Labs, is doing something that sounds like science fiction. His company just built an AI model trained on living human skin — skin that was still alive when the data was captured, not fixed in formaldehyde or dried on glass slides. The model can predict how skin responds to treatments, which is the holy grail for dermatology and cosmetics.

The bigger news is what Inherent announced last week: their AI teammate just outperformed Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating real research. That's not marketing — it's a specific benchmark they published. The lab is run by DeepMind alumni, which means they know how to build models that don't just hallucinate.

Polansky is working at the intersection of biotech and AI, which is where the real value is going to be created this decade. The models that matter won't be chatbots — they'll be the ones that can reason about biology, chemistry, and materials in ways humans can't. Living tissue data is the rare kind of training that can't be scraped from the internet. It has to be grown, captured, and preserved. That scarcity is what makes it valuable.

Why this matters for us: the next wave of AI breakthroughs is being built on data that can't be copied from a website — biotech, climate, materials — and the people who own that data are the ones who'll make the real money.