🧬 AI Psychosis, Coordination Tax & the Limits of LLMs | Alex Telford (2/4)

Episode notes

The Biotech Startups Podcast is powered by Excedr—helping life science startups accelerate R&D and commercialization with founder-friendly equipment leasing. Skip the upfront costs, stay lean, and focus on breakthrough science. As a TBSP listener, you can get exclusive perks through Excedr's partner network—special savings, promotions, and more. Explore these offers today: "The models are like this bunch of fractured entities — depending on how you prompt them, you can access one fractured space or another." In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, Jon Chee sits down with Alex Telford, founder of Convoke, who spent nearly seven years in biopharma strategy consulting before what he calls "AI psychosis" set him on a different path. Alex traces the arc from biochemistry at Bristol and synthetic biology at UCL to discovering consulting existed only after graduating, joining a boutique Swiss firm two weeks before it was acquired, and learning one core lesson: clients want a recommendation to push back on, not a data dump. Key Topics Covered: The Slot Machine Problem: Why LLMs fail to get it right the first time — data scarcity, epistemic unknowability, and model architecture.