A handful of AI-designed drugs have proceeded into human trials — one as far as Phase III, widespread human testing — but the reality is that the roadblocks aren’t necessarily ones that AI can solve today.<br><br>Also, TerraPower&#x27;s nuclear power plant possesses a strategic advantage over competitors, especially when chasing after data center deals.<br>Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI isn’t close to curing cancer. Vivodyne says it knows what it will take; plus, TerraPower’s nuclear reactor has a secret weapon for powering AI data centers

TechCrunch Startup News

This is TechCrunch A biotech startup called Vivodyne says the AI drug discovery industry has a data problem, and that it has built a machine to fix it.

The company built modular robotic labs that can grow 20 kinds of human tissue, then autonomously dose and monitor them, generating the kind of causal biological data that today's AI models are missing. Data that today mostly comes from animal testing or studies of single cells or proteins, not living tissue. Vivodyne's CEO and co-founder Andre Giorgescu said,

Absent human testing, what are these AI models going to do? They're going to cure cancer in mice. Even Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei wrote over the weekend that claims that AI will cure cancer have become more cliché than credible, or as he put it, the thing that will work is actually curing cancer. To be fair, the idea that AI will cure cancer is something Amadei himself has tossed out in previous essays.

Sam Altman has repeatedly cited curing cancer as a justification for OpenAI's push toward AGI and ever-larger compute build-outs. And Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis said last year that AI could potentially cure all disease within a decade. Now, the actual results remain tepid. A handful of AI-designed drugs have proceeded into human trials, one as far as Phase III.

But the reality is that the roadblocks are not necessarily ones that AI can solve today. Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold was a big advance for understanding the building blocks of life, but it has yet to actually produce a new drug. Isomorphic Labs, founded to build on AlphaFold, is expecting its first trials, originally planned for last year by the end of this year.

AI isn’t close to curing cancer. Vivodyne says it knows what it will take; plus, TerraPower’s nuclear reactor has a secret weapon for powering AI data centers

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

AI isn’t close to curing cancer. Vivodyne says it knows what it will take; plus, TerraPower’s nuclear reactor has a secret weapon for powering AI data centers

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.