Vijay Pande
@vijaypande
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Founder, GP, & Managing Partner of a16z bio+health. Founder, Folding@home. Investor, Scientist, Engineer, Founder. AI, Bio, everything in between. https://t.co/X4mRNyio9S
Menlo Park, CA
Joined June 2008
1/ Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-addiction Drug?. People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have also stopped drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting.
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1/ I’m thrilled to announce our fourth @a16z Bio Fund, bringing $1.5B of new capital to invest in the intersection of technology, life sciences & healthcare.
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1/We think the biggest company in the world will be a consumer health tech company. Four of the top five biggest companies in the world are consumer companies, and healthcare is one of the nation’s biggest industries. @daisydwolf @a16z @a16zBioHealth .
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1/ Some people have been suggesting that this work shows how AI is dangerous -- AI can design molecules that are toxic. This is doomerism BS. Let me explain why .
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1/ @Jeff_Jordan and I are excited to announce that @a16z is leading @Levels $12M Seed Round to bring biowearables into the mainstream and improve metabolic health.
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1/ Over the past few weeks, @a16z bio companies have seen $1B in follow-on investments, all for advancing human healthcare and well being. It’s time to build. Here’s how we’re continuing to build through our amazingly talented entrepreneurs:.
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“Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after a pandemic will seem inadequate.”. – Secretary Mike Leavitt, US Department of Health and Human Services, 2007.
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3/ It’s like saying AI can design an airplane that can’t fly and everyone dies. It’s easy to design things that don’t work. We don't need AI for that.
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True disruption almost always comes from the outside. Higher education is not just ripe for disruption but it’s deeply needed. Congrats @bariweiss @nfergus @JTLonsdale on this important new beginning.
Three years ago @uaustinorg was an idea @nfergus, @JTLonsdale, Pano Kanelos and I discussed. Today in Austin it becomes a reality. Welcome to the class of 2028. The first class of UATX. You aren’t just students, you are founders.
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I'm thrilled to announce that Vineeta Agarwala will be joining @a16z as our newest General Partner! @vintweeta has had many different roles in the healthcare space: as a physician, as an operator at tech-driven healthcare companies, and as an investor.
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“ChatGPT performed at or near the passing threshold for all three [medical licensing] exams without any specialized training or reinforcement. Additionally, ChatGPT demonstrated a high level of concordance and insight in its explanations.”
Is expert AI better than the median doctor? @pmarca and @vijaypande discuss the implications of expert AI in the bio and healthcare space. Watch the full video from @a16zbiohealth's Bio Eats World. 👇 .
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My take on How to Engineer Biology fresh off the press at Scientific American.
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2/They're forgetting that it's actually quite easy for molecules to be toxic (that's partly why drug design is so hard), and so AI doing so isn't anything new or scary.
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I’m thrilled to join the board and lead the $300M series B investment in @DevotedHealth , leading the way to create a modern Medicare Advantage plan to solve the critical national challenge of how to improve care for **and** reduce cost. @a16z
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1/ What’s the closest historical cataclysm to Covid? I’d say World War 2, bringing global upheaval & new winners and losers, followed by decades of innovation and the Military Industrial Complex. What comes after Covid? The Industrial Bio Complex and .
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2/ It fun to speculate how this could work. An obvious thesis is that there are so many comorbidities with weight gain that reverse with its loss. Either way, amazing to see this.
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Of all of the regulatory agencies, it’s odd for @Chamath to suggest that the FDA is the most natural example of how to perform AI regulation. That suggests his base-case belief is that .1) most AI is dangerous –– eg most molecules are toxic and .2) it’s not clear if any given AI.
If you invent a novel drug, you need the government to vet and approve it (FDA) before you can commercialize it. If you invent a new mode of air travel, you need the government to vet and approve it (FAA) before you can commercialize it. If you create a new security, you need.
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The biggest wins for AI will be in healthcare.
Geoffrey Hinton: 200,000 people a year die of incorrect medical diagnoses in the United States. AI will fix that in the next 10 years.
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Fantastic review of ML. A must read for physical scientists interested in ML:."A high-bias, low-variance introduction to Machine Learning for physicists” by.Pankaj Mehta, Ching-Hao Wang, Alexandre G. R. Day, and Clint Richardson.
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Sorry to rain on the CS parade, but actually, that’s histogramming not sorting — makes sense why it’s O(n)! :-).
My new algorithm sorts inputs in O(n) time!
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AI is going to have its biggest impact on Bio, which in many ways is a pre Industrial Revolution, bespoke, artisanal process. As exciting as it is, this is just a small sign of what’s to come over the next two decades.
1.8M+ researchers have used @GoogleDeepMind’s AlphaFold protein predictions in their work on vaccine development, cancer treatment + more. AlphaFold 3 is the latest breakthrough, predicting the structures + interactions of all of life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy.
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Hey Tech, It’s Time To Build. In Healthcare. In the past few months, the founders of Instacart, Spotify, and Coinbase have all started new healthcare companies. Why are these seasoned tech founders jumping into tech-driven healthcare?. 1/.
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LFG!!!.
Seems like a consensus is forming amongst many smart people! . This is Jensen Huang, CEO of $NVDA. Basically WATCH OUT for the impending biotech BOOM 💥
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1/ IT'S TIME TO HEAL. Tech is often criticized for a culture of moving fast and breaking things. But what we saw last year was tech enabling bio and healthcare to move fast, to *heal*.
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1/ Today, we’re proud to announce we’ve led the Series A for Slingshot, the world’s first foundation model for psychology. This brings the total capital raised for the company to $40 million.
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1. Four years ago, when we launched our first bio fund, the idea that software would make an impact in drug discovery sounded like science fiction; the idea it could transform the patient experience in healthcare a fool’s errand.
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Quantum Computing will catch people by surprise. Forest from @rigetti will enable to develop for quantum, now.
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1/ I am thrilled to announce that @a16z has led Scribe's $20M Series A investment round and that I have joined their board of directors. Today I am excited to see Scribe unveil their mission and progress to the broader community.
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“Cows are extremely inefficient at turning plants into dairy” -- Nobell CEO Magi Richani. It takes 6 kg of plant protein to produce just 1 kg of animal protein, 1 gallon of milk 1000 gallons of water, not to mention that dairy cows contribute 2% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
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I'm excited to announce @eladgil and @a16z are co-leading @bioagelabs $90M Series C round to support their AI-driven platform to map the key pathways that drive human aging and advance their first platform-derived therapies into clinical trials in H1 2021.
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Machine Learning is often viewed as a black box curve fitting scheme, devoid from physics. We take an approach to derive a new scheme for DFT where ML can naturally plug in and learn the missing features of the functional, leading to remarkable accuracy.
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India has the opportunity to be a leader in crypto, a key infrastructure for the future. It would bring in potentially billions in new investments and create a new role as a leader in this key space.
India should support crypto as a pillar of its foreign & domestic policy. It defends national security by preventing deplatforming, deters fraud via on-chain accounting, and offers a decentralized alternative to a new Cold War. @nsitharaman @narendramodi
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Boeing is literally the textbook case study for regulatory capture. Which is exactly where we're heading with the new AI proposed regs -- big guys stifle competition and we are left with just regulatory theater.
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Inspired by a new wave of longevity, concierge medicine, and diagnostic companies, consumers are taking their health into their own hands. They’re flocking to get extensive preventative testing—from comprehensive blood tests and full-body MRIs to cancer screenings and genetic.
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Biology is riddled with technical debt. What does this mean for how we can wrap our minds around its complexity and break through? Some of my thoughts for how this impacts the goals of Engineering Biology. @a16z
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With @AppCardiogram ’s AI approach, the Apple Watch can do things never intended — identify issues in heart disease, hypertension, and now even diabetes –– with high accuracy.
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I’m very excited about joining @a16z as a General Partner, investing in software companies in Bio.
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When you look at the numbers, it’s surprising how little health care can actually help prevent premature death, compared with the other forces at work. It’s a great opportunity for tech to save people’s lives through new mechanisms.
Consumer-focused healthcare can save lives by focusing on changing behavior
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Company with N employees:.- sqrt(N) doing most, with the rest:.- junior people with reasonable attitudes and minimal skills & contributions .- 0.1x lifestyle workers .- Good talkers, look like stars but are smoke and mirrors, spending time lobbying others instead of doing (-1x).
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1/ The Next Pandemic is Cost in Healthcare. And artificial intelligence (AI) will play a transformative role in solving this problem. And along the way, shows a more general solution to a “disease” in economics -- curing Baumol’s cost disease.
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.@a16z podcast Bio Eats World with Jennifer Doudna @doudna_lab! What does the future of biology look like?Can discovery itself be industrialized? What can be built on today’s discoveries? Doudna talks about the arc of her career and work through this lens.
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1/ Aiming for 100 healthy years, @Function Health's platform collects over 100 biomarkers from lab tests, surpassing typical annual physicals, then combines the data from labs, EHRs, and wearables to deliver clear, personalized health insights. This approach shifts the focus.
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Goodbye plastic! @apeelsciences is ready to prove that the plastic versus food waste faceoff is “a false choice,” says CEO @jamestrogers . Apeel is launching ‘plastic-free’ cucumbers at @Walmart to cut back on waste. @FortuneMagazine @bethkowitt
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Lots of mind blowing tech emerging. But the real challenge now turns to go to market — who pays for this, how do doctors put it into their workflow, who makes sure it’s reliable in life and death situations? The team that overcomes those challenges will change healthcare.
Our latest health research has been published in @nature today, using AI to predict patient deterioration up to two days before it happens. Read more here:
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Congratulations to Jennifer Doudna @doudna_lab and Emmanuelle Charpentier for their 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing."
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1/ AI can change how we prevent and treat illness, but to truly transform a nuanced field like health and medicine, we need to invest in what I term “specialist” AIs that learn and navigate complex decisions like our best physicians and drug developers do.
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We’re now at a tipping point where AI can supercharge clinician decision making. @bayesianhealth has brought this new capability to the front lines of healthcare with demonstrable results. Thrilled to lead Bayesian's Series A & partner with @suchisaria !.
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CAR T is just getting started. Bringing aging biology into the mainstream will have broad impact into numerous indications — getting closer to that mythical fountain of youth. @JorgeCondeBio @andy23tran @lr_bio @a16z.
We know about CAR T therapy for cancer, but could it also be the fountain of youth? @jorgecondebio, @andy23tran and @LR_bio discuss new research in @nature which engineers T cells to attack the "sleeping" cells that underlie many age-related conditions:
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New @a16z podcast “Breaking into Bio” with @DaphneKoller of @insitro and @atulbutte from @ucsf giving advice for founding or being early employees in startups, especially those at the intersection of Bio and ML.
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Machine learning’s new frontier: Chemistry! Great progress, much more to do. @techreview @tsimonite @A_Aspuru_Guzik
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Proud to see five @a16z portfolio companies -- @apeelsciences @Airbnb @oculus @Pinterest and @SlackHQ — on @TIME Magazine’s 50 “Genius Companies of 2018” with other greats!
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And it gets stranger:. Ozempic and Wegovy appear to reverse the impairments in cancer-fighting natural killer cells seen in people with obesity, independent of weight loss.
1/ Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-addiction Drug?. People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have also stopped drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting.
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Genesis Therapeutics lands a stellar $200M Series B! Their #GEMS platform is leading the way, blending AI with physical insights for next-gen treatments. Congrats to @enfeinberg & the team!.
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This is the century of Biology. But, yea, biology is hard for people to wrap their head around the complexity and unknown unknowns. AI combined with engineering automation has emerged as a key step forward in unraveling that complexity and uncovering those unknown unknowns.
Seems like tech is in love. 🧬💘 . "Where do I think the next amazing revolution is going to come? And this is going to be flat-out one of the biggest ones ever. There's no question that digital biology is going to be it." — Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. "Biology is the next big
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.@amazon AI knows me well in broad strokes, but clearly not quite well enough! They just emailed me this book recommendation:
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Congratulations @DaphneKoller and the @insitro team on all of your milestones towards reshaping drug discovery and development through Machine Learning––including your $400M Series C financing announced today.
We're thrilled to announce our $400M Series C financing, which will greatly enable us to continue advancing our vision to reshape the discovery and development of transformative medicines by leveraging #machinelearning and biology and chemistry at scale.
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Engineered through materials science principles, “this plant-based coating makes fruits and veggies last up to four times longer,” tackling logistics for the 1st and 3rd worlds, $1T food waste, and making a dent in world hunger. @apeelsciences @michellelinnSF @inhabitat @a16z
Apeel is solving #foodwaste in a way that works with nature—not against it. #sustainability #foodforfood @inhabitat
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Bio is eating malls! :-) .For 51 years, The Shops at Tanforan have lived in San Bruno, about 10 miles south of the San Francisco city limits. Now, the mall is getting razed, and the 44-acre site is being redeveloped into housing and a new biotech campus.
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The biology of aging is going to be key to getting us out of this pandemic, treating COVID and beyond. Congratulations @bioagelabs on your progress with BGE-175, this major step forward.
@Bioagelabs announces plans to advance PGD2 DP1 inhibitor BGE-175 into Phase 2 clinical trials to treat older #COVID19 patients by targeting immune #aging. BGE-175 selected using BioAge’s AI-driven platform of human aging data. #AI #healthspan Learn more:
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Reinforcement Learning outperforms previous algorithms at RNA Design. Analysis of its solutions shows it has successfully learned some advanced strategies previously identified, allowing it to solve some very difficult structures. @PandeLab
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Corona is accelerating the future. Our ability to industrialize the drug development process via engineering means that we have more hope for speeding this process than ever—not just to defeat corona, but to benefit the development of all new medicines in the future—@endpts OpEd.
@vijaypande offers his thoughts on -- Drug discovery in the age of coronavirus.@endpts.
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Congratulations @enfeinberg and Genesis Therapeutics for their recent partnership deal with Genetech/Roche!
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💪💪💪
Our @MorganLBrennan discussed where the US stands in the #AI race with China, investing opportunities and more with @a16z's @bhorowitz and @davidu. Full interview:
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As an undergraduate at @Princeton, I was blessed that Prof. Phil Anderson was my mentor in my thesis. To this day, I often consider points he made to me then, as well as the deep and fearless way he approached science. His passing is a huge loss.
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See you Monday 5pm PST on @joinClubhouse for @a16z’s “It’s Time to Heal ” with @vijaypande, @JorgeCondeBio, @vintweeta, @julesyoo, discussing the future of Bio and healthcare broadly. This week’s special guest @jamestrogers of @apeelsciences !
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100% of stock trades used to be made by humans. Today, 80% are made by computer algorithms. AI is about to bring a similar revolution to healthcare. And many don't realize how big this will be. "Underestimating AI in Healthcare" -- .@daisydwolf @JayRughani @adelatomsejova.
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It was wonderful hosting the @foldingathome & @PandeLab reunion, seeing old friends and colleagues. It was striking to see how many have worked with each other after leaving the lab. Thanks to @guha and @drGregBowman for organizing!
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In the decade since its discovery the #CRISPR toolbox has exploded, accelerating curiosity-driven science and establishing itself as a foundational technology for many biotech companies looking to engineer biology.
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1/ Understanding how we age is a way into a new era of medicine, into identifying new targets for diseases we’ve never truly understood (let alone known how to treat). The cure for aging just might be the cure for disease. @kpfortney @bioagelabs @a16z .
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Hey tech — it’s time to build in healthcare!.
Healthcare represents a colossal, untapped market ripe for technological disruption. @vijaypande & @daisydwolf call on tech to build in healthcare in one of our top articles of 2023:
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Engineering biology is transforming many areas in Bio. Here's my take on "How to *Reverse* Engineer Biology." .
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An exaflop now seems to be not that far away. Glad to see it going to fight COVID.
Amazing! @foldingathome now has over 470 petaFLOPS of compute power. To put that in perspective, that's more than 2x the peak performance of the Summit super computer!.
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Congrats @enfeinberg and Genesis Therapeutics on your $52M Series A, led by Rock Springs, with investment participation from @TRowePrice , @a16z, @felicis , @MenloVentures , @JazzVentures , @PropagatorVC , and others!.
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WOW–@foldingathome breaks past 2.4 EXAFLOPS–more than the top 500 supercomputers combined! Interestingly, if you look how Summit and other supercomputers are being used to fight Covid, they're running them also in a FAH style massively parallel approach, just a lot smaller.
With our collective power, we are now at ~2.4 exaFLOPS (faster than the top 500 supercomputers combined)! We complement supercomputers like IBM Summit, which runs short calculations using 1000s of GPUs at once, by spreading longer calculations around the world in smaller chunks!
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I'm thrilled to announce @a16z investment in @asimov_io, to engineer bio at the cellular scale by applying the same tool-chain for electronic circuits.
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Congratulations Jakob Uszkoreit & the Inceptive team for your $100M Series A Fundraise, co-lead by @nvidia ventures and @a16zBioHealth. We're excited to continue to partner with you on using Generative AI to build mRNA medicines. @a16z @kyosu .
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Screening for Hypertension and Sleep Apnea with DeepHeart – @AppCardiogram shows how AI + AppleWatch can tackle numerous issues as they are all linked via the autonomic nervous system.
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@netcapgirl Hey @netcapgirl — where is this from? The tech review article published seems to go the other way.
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All Eyes Are on Digital Health Pioneer Omada's Next Move — Building a huge company by healing people before they get sick rather than monetizing the sickness.
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Evil is easy, Good is hard – why AI will heal not hurt. We shouldn’t worry about the ability of AI to create bioterrorism weapons. Restricting AI’s ability to understand biology and chemistry would pose a far greater danger. Here's why:.
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I’m excited to support Ciitizen and its mission to empower patients through bringing health care’s “dark data” into the light. @ciitizencorp
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By request -- some pics from the early days of @foldingathome and @pandelab . Please forgive the mess -- we were all still learning!
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Please join @a16z bio on @Clubhouse for “Predicting COVID with Michael Levitt and Balaji Srinivasan” . Monday, Jun 14 at 5:00 PM PDT. with . @balajis,.@MLevitt_NP2013,.@pmarca,.@vijaypande,.@JorgeCondeBio,.@vintweeta,.@julesyoo,.
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Bio is mirroring the steps taking by CS 50 years ago, with hopefully its own 50 years of science-fiction like innovation. @asimov_io @a16z
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Deep Chem is our effort to bridge the gap between modern Machine Learning methods and researchers in molecular sciences. V2.0 out today, more on the way. @deep_chem
I'm excited to announce that @deep_chem 2.0 has just been released! We've significantly refactored and extended our TensorGraph framework (built on @TensorFlow) to let us support more deep learning chem/bio/science applications. Please check it out!
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ok, so you build a giant super braniac computer, ask it a question, and the answer is . 42?.
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.@Rigetti has the potential to finally unlock quantum computing for comp chemistry, machine learning and much more.
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Tomorrow — join special guest Anne Wojcicki @annewoj23, CEO of @23andMe, and @a16z for her take on the future of all things bio & healthcare, with @JorgeCondeBio, @pmarca, @vintweeta, @julesyoo, and @vijaypande. Mar 22 at 5:00 PM PDT on @joinclubhouse.
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Congratulations @DaphneKoller (CEO/founder of @Insitro) for your pioneering advances in Machine Learning in Biology and Healthcare!.
ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award recipient @DaphneKoller has been instrumental in using #MachineLearning as a tool to advance biology and medicine. As a co-founder of @coursera, she has also made great contributions to democratizing education:
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ML is changing how drug design is performed. @TwoXAR has demonstrated their technology can speed and lower the cost of drug design and is now ready to scale their pipeline. I’m excited to support them in their series A, led by Softbank Ventures.
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Please join @Microsoft CEO @satyanadella , @NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, and others in supporting @foldingathome ‘s efforts to bring the worlds computers together to fight COVID. “Together, We Are Powerful.”
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