---
title: "Kyunghyun Cho"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Kyunghyun Cho"
aliases: ["K. Cho"]
first_seen: "2026-10-26T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["neural scaling laws","machine translation / noisy-channel model","drug discovery (AI-driven)","Prescient Design / Genentech","NYU"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


Professor of computer science at NYU working on deep learning and natural
language processing, and co-author, under his own name, of a 2025 blog post
arguing that AI-driven drug discovery is stuck in an early, rule-based era
the way machine translation was before its late-1980s statistical turn.
Beyond that argument, his own homepage records a parallel industry career:
he co-founded the antibody/protein-design startup Prescient Design in early
2021, which Genentech acquired later that year, and served as an Executive
Director of Frontier Research and Senior Fellow at Genentech until January
2026 — five years running an industrial drug-discovery lab alongside his
academic scaling-laws work.

In this vault Cho first appeared only as a byline on the "Neural Neural
Scaling Laws" line of work (co-authorship alone, per the vault's promotion
rule, is a mention — not a hub). He earns the hub here on separate
standing: his own blog post making an independent, self-credited historical
argument, and his own bio naming a role (co-founder, lab lead) rather than
just an author credit.

## References
- [[claim-cho-2025-ai-drug-discovery-needs-mt-style-statistical-shift]] — his
  Cold War/machine-translation analogy for AI drug discovery, from his own
  blog, in his own words.
- [[claim-cho-cofounded-prescient-design-acquired-by-genentech]] — his
  co-founding of Prescient Design and subsequent Genentech role, from his
  own homepage.
- [[claim-hu-2026-no-independent-corroboration-found-as-of-2026-10-24]] —
  co-author (byline only) of the NeuNeu scaling-laws preprint this note
  audits.
- [[claim-lourie-2025-six-category-downstream-scaling-taxonomy]] —
  co-author (byline only) of the related Lourie, Hu & Cho taxonomy paper.
- [[entity-ortet-inc]] — a second company his own homepage lists him as
  co-founder/CEO of, as yet unexplained.