Uszkoreit also highlighted the potential for AI in the pharmaceutical sector, citing a Morgan Stanley report that identified a $50 billion market opportunity. He believes there is room for more companies to enter the sector and that the unique combination of biology and deep learning that Inceptive is working on sets it apart from competitors. The company is also developing a new method for gathering data, which involves running experiments with robots, people, models, and neural networks to generate novel, synthetic mRNA molecules.
Key takeaways:
- Jakob Uszkoreit, a former Google AI researcher and co-author of the seminal 2017 paper “Attention is All You Need,” co-founded Inceptive, a biotech company that uses Transformers to create 'biological software'.
- Inceptive designs unique molecules made of mRNA, tests them, and licenses them to pharmaceutical companies for clinical trials. This technology was used to create the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines.
- Uszkoreit believes there is a 'moral obligation' to use Transformers to develop new vaccines and drug treatments, and sees a vast market opportunity for AI in the pharmaceutical sector.
- Despite the competition, Uszkoreit believes Inceptive stands out due to its interdisciplinary approach and its method of gathering data, which involves running experiments with robots, people, models and neural networks to generate novel, synthetic mRNA molecules.