What Comes After AGI? Sumon Sadhu on the Post-Biology Era

The tech world is consumed by the race to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but what happens when we get there? In a keynote session at the Hellen's Rock Founder Retreat 2026, serial AI entrepreneur, angel investor, and scientist Sumon Sadhu suggests: we enter the "Post-Biology Era", where we escape the limits of our evolution. He argues that the next three decades will see humanity shift from chasing biology to rewriting it, a transition accelerated by a single, fundamental concept he calls "the loop".

It thinks on 20 watts

While we obsess over supercomputers, Sumon points out that the device you are using right now — your brain — is the most powerful computer on Earth.

“You're actually running the most powerful computer on Earth, about a billion operations per second on roughly 20W of power, the same amount as the bulb in your fridge.”

A top supercomputer might match that raw speed, but it requires a staggering 20 megawatts, a million times more power. “On the measure that actually counts, performance per watt, biology beats our best silicon by about a million fold. That gap is the hidden engine of this whole talk,” he states. This is not mysticism, he notes, but engineering, with a spec sheet that evolution finished billions of years ago, featuring everything from photon-level light detection to molecular turbines running at nearly 100% efficiency.

It's not the smartest mind, it's the fastest loop

For Sadhu, both life and intelligence are driven by a shared mechanism: a feedback loop of sensing the world, building a model, acting, measuring the outcome, and updating the model. With the AGI revolution, this loop is becoming a cheap, on-demand utility, like electricity from a socket.

This fundamentally changes the rules of competition in business. The question is no longer who has the single smartest mind, but who can run the loop fastest. “When your loop closes in days and your rivals close in quarters, you don't out-argue them and you don't outspend them, you out-evolve them,” Sadhu argues.

For founders and leaders, this means instrumenting their companies as organisms, relentlessly shortening the cycles of building, selling, and learning. As machines master the "how," the uniquely human role becomes deciding the "why" — setting the goal, taste, and judgment for the loop.

When the loop gets a body

The decade following the AGI transition, Sadhu predicts, will be the era of physical intelligence, as the loop gets a body.

Robots will move from digital simulations to the physical world, running into what roboticist Hans Moravec noted as a paradox: tasks easy for humans (folding a towel, walking) are brutally hard for machines, while tasks we find hard (chess, calculus, logic) are easy for them.

The reason, Sadhu explains, is evolutionary age. Our sensory-motor skills have been perfected over 500 million years. The challenge is not simply building better muscles — it is building better computation. In his framing, a robot is a body paired with a nervous system, except that this nervous system runs on silicon rather than biology. That nervous system is made of silicon. The entire race, therefore, is to reverse engineer the brain’s 20-watt efficiency trick into a chip.

Hacking the source code of life

If we cannot win by copying biology, perhaps we should stop trying.

This is the turn that leads to the Post-Biology era. Instead of re-implementing life in steel and silicon, we are beginning to edit the original, using AI and robotics to design going beyond the defaults of evolution.

“A genome is editable information, which means biology's givens, whatever laws, they're just parameters,” Sadhu highlights.

This opens up once-fictional possibilities. He points to labs designing enzymes that eat plastic, de-extinction projects aiming to bring back the woolly mammoth by 2028, and new possibilities in bioelectricity.

Citing the work of biologist Michael Levin, he also explained how electrical code can tell tissues what to build. A cancer cell is one that has escaped this network; reconnecting it could revert it to its original program, offering a path to treatment without chemotherapy. In this new era, Sadhu notes, “medicine is no longer a chemical that you swallow. It's a program that you write.”

This power brings profound ethical responsibility. Scientists in the field have already hit the brakes twice, calling for moratoriums on heritable human embryo editing and research into molecules that could evade the immune system. The capability, however, does not disappear. As nature’s constraints become our choices, the stakes are higher than ever.

“We spent 3.5 billion years as a result of biology,” he concludes.