Sean McClain is the founder and CEO, and Gregory Hannum is the VP of AI Research at Absci, a biotech company that's using deep learning to expedite drug discovery and development.
Lukas, Sean, and Greg talk about why Absci started investing so heavily in ML research (it all comes back to the data), what it'll take to build the GPT-3 of DNA, and where the future of pharma is headed. Sean and Greg also share some of the challenges of building cross-functional teams and combining two highly specialized fields like biology and ML.
The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-sean-and-greg
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Connect with Sean and Greg:
📍 Sean's Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanrmcclain
📍 Greg's Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregory_hannum
📍 Absci's Twitter: https://twitter.com/abscibio
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:53 How Absci merges biology and AI
11:24 Why Absci started investing in ML
19:00 Creating the GPT-3 of DNA
25:34 Investing in data collection and in ML teams
33:14 Clinical trials and Absci's revenue structure
38:17 Combining knowledge from different domains
45:22 The potential of multitask learning
50:43 Why biological data is tricky to work with
55:00 Outro
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