Sheryl Sandberg, plus open-source AI gene editing explained

Dave Goldberg was the anonymous “Fake Chamath” Twitter account, a secret Sandberg and Goldberg’s brother chose to reveal nine years after his death. Goldberg wrote many posts himself, while friends from their poker circle helped workshop jokes mocking Chamath Palihapitiya’s public persona.

After Goldberg’s sudden death, Sandberg said Palihapitiya handled immediate logistics and then stayed involved with her children for years. He taught them poker because Goldberg would have, and on the ninth anniversary of their father’s death they were still playing together.

Sandberg said she made Screams Before Silence because she believed sexual violence from October 7 was being denied despite eyewitness accounts. Philanthropist Joey Lowe and his wife financed the trip; Sandberg interviewed first responders, a Nova survivor and released hostage Amit Sasana.

The evidence Sandberg described was unusually dependent on witnesses rather than standard forensic records. She said no rape kits were done amid the mass-casualty chaos, many first responders avoided photographing bodies, and privately funded researcher Kochav Levy was compiling hundreds of interviews.

Sandberg said several feminist organizations privately told her they believed sexual violence occurred but feared speaking publicly because employees or younger supporters would object. She contrasted that with groups that publicly condemned the violence, making internal political pressure—not simple disbelief—a key part of her account.

The documentary’s lack of the most graphic photographs was partly a distribution constraint, not simply an editorial choice. Sandberg said first responders holding the images had vows against sharing them, while the film’s free YouTube release would not have passed platform standards with those images included.

Sandberg’s position was not a blanket defense of Israel’s war conduct: she backed two states, Palestinian peace and prosperity, and a permanent ceasefire. Her fixed line was that those positions could coexist with condemning and documenting sexual violence, which she treated separately from broader arguments over Gaza.

Friedberg said ProFluent trained a protein language model on 26 trillion base pairs to design novel CRISPR-Cas proteins, then open-sourced one called OpenCRISPR-1. He said it was roughly 400 mutations from known natural proteins and outperformed Cas9 in lab tests, potentially reducing patent barriers for researchers and startups.