Rohan Varma

Marty Cagan made the product operating model famous. But if you look at how the top AI companies are operating, it is quite different: Anthropic engineers prototype hundreds of solutions and ship without ever consulting a product manager or designer. OpenAI’s new hot product Codex started with just two PMs, one designer, and about 40 engineers, collectively responsible for 10 to 12 distinct product surfaces.

Quintin Pope, Rohan Varma, Christine Tataru, Maude M David, Xiaoli Fern. Abstract We use open source human gut microbiome data to learn a microbial “language” model by adapting techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP). Our microbial “language” model is trained in a self-supervised fashion (i.e., without additional external labels) to capture the interactions among different microbial taxa and the common compositional patterns in microbial communities.

Citation: Pope Q, Varma R, Tataru C, David MM, Fern X (2025) Learning a deep language model for microbiomes: The power of large scale unlabeled microbiome data. PLoS Comput Biol 21(5): e1011353. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011353 Editor: Stacey D. Finley, University of Southern California, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Received: July 25, 2023; Accepted: March 24, 2025; Published: May 7, 2025 Copyright: © 2025 Pope et al.