[j_bum]

It is awesome.

But what I’ll say is, ideally they would demonstrate whether this model can perform any better than simple linear models for predicting gene expression interactions.

We’ve seen that some of the single cell “foundation” models aren’t actually the best at in silico perturbation modeling. Simple linear models can outperform them.

So this article makes me wonder: if we take this dataset they’ve acquired, and run very standard single cell RNA seq analyses (including pathway analyses), would this published association pop out?

My guess is that yes… it would. You’d just need the right scientist, right computational biologist, and right question.

However, I don’t say this to discredit the work in TFA. We are still in the early days of scSeq foundation models, and I am excited about their potential.