Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to news on April 3, American venture capitalist Jim Breyer (Jim Breyer) found that combining computer science with biology, chemistry and physics can equip employees with AI plus one of the "dual skills" in a certain discipline, thus gaining more development opportunities in large technology companies by communicating with the chief executives of Apple, Microsoft and Dell.

As a venture capitalist, Pexels Breyer has invested in a number of groundbreaking technology ideas in recent decades, such as Meta and Spotify. However, he believes that the combination of AI and healthcare will be the next most attractive investment opportunity.

Since 2017, Breyer says his priority is to find the best disease and medical data from leading medical institutions, such as Memorial Sloan Kettering, MD Anderson and Johns Hopkins. The data are highly proprietary and need to be licensed to startups backed by Breyer Capital. "the combination of AI and medicine is probably the most attractive new investment opportunity I've ever seen," he said. "

Breyer also said he is not the only one who holds this view. He recently had a discussion with Michael Dell founder Michael Dell, who agreed. Breyer also had private conversations with the chief executives of a number of technology companies. "in the past 12 months, based on direct meetings with Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella Satya and Apple chief executive Tim Cook, big technology companies have not doubled or tripled their investment in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, but 10 or 50 times," he said.

However, if there is no new combination between traditional technology and medicine, this opportunity will not translate into achievement. "bringing together 32-or 35-year-old machine learning talents from Amazon, Google or Microsoft to work closely with Nobel Prize-winning doctors and great medical institutions is indeed a challenging task, but it will also be an area where public and private companies make breakthroughs in return on investment," Breyer said.

Dr. Sanjiv Patel, president and CEO of Relay Therapeutics, who works on the combination of drug discovery and computing science, said that unlike the "false dawn" of the past few decades, the cross-technology breakthrough was real. "this is no longer science fiction. We have tested the technology in three clinical trials." But he warned that such a breakthrough would face many obstacles and a timetable would be difficult to set. He also admitted: "there is a lot of hype. People say that you press a button in the meta universe and you get a life-changing drug, but I don't think that's true. We are considering that changes will increase over time, and there are many major challenges to overcome."

Some of these challenges will be specific cases, as artificial intelligence attempts to transform the entire healthcare value chain; others involve high-quality, clean data sets-"it's not easy to get," he said; the third challenge is to connect talent in the various fields of science that Breyer mentioned.

"the availability of bilingual scientists will be our bottleneck," says Patel, who defines bilingual scientists as scientists who are proficient in computing and one of the core disciplines that are important to medicine, such as physics, biology or chemistry. "this is a big problem," he said. "

Dr. Vinita Agara (Vineeta Agarwala), general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said that practitioners in all industries should assume that they need the support of AI technology and be open to using it. Her venture capital firm is "looking for opportunities" for founders who say they want to use AI to enhance their capabilities so they can do more. "companies, researchers and entrepreneurs all view AI this way: embracing AI looks a bit like embracing computers decades ago," she says. "unlike the 30-year development of personal computers, AI could prosper in five to 10 years."

As a doctor, Agarwala says the medical information she needs to know has reached a "frenzied level", from medical literature to clinical trials to information from a large number of patient data. She also points out that Microsoft has integrated ChatGPT with its medical dictation software for doctors. These AI bridges help to solve the direct workflow problems that lead to doctors' job burnout. Agarwala says that in the workflow of doctors facing patients and dealing with the health insurance reimbursement system, large language models may help reduce stress and ease doctors' job burnout.

Agarwala says AI has been used in pharmaceutical chemistry teams to help make better decisions, such as better molecules or predicting the properties of certain molecules in advance. It is expected that in the next 5 to 10 years, people who choose to use AI to enhance its role will have this "super ability". "the question is not whether AI can do what human experts are doing, but in what ways it can provide us with insights that humans cannot get," she says. "there are a lot of exciting opportunities for big technology companies and big pharmaceutical companies, as well as more opportunities for people with skills in both areas."

Cloud services run by large technology companies such as Microsoft and Amazon will benefit a lot over the next few years, but for employees who already work at these companies, Breyer will focus on mid-career talent who can see the future of AI and medicine.

"for me, the biggest challenge day after day, round and round, is to bring together interdisciplinary individuals and teams, including people from biotechnology, computers, professional chemistry and other fields, and get them to work together," Breyer said. The people I see are 30-to 35-year-old employees of companies such as Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet who are willing to work in this field all their lives, whether because of their family background or optimistic about market opportunities. By contrast, I rarely see experienced employees doing this for more than 10 years. "

When Breyer talked to the next generation of professionals, including students from the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard, Stanford and Columbia, his message was clear: "this is the biggest opportunity I've ever seen." however, make sure you are studying linear algebra, computing, chemistry and biology, because all opportunities are related to these technologies at the intersection of computing and science. "

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