Before co-founding the biotech startup Inceptive, Jacob Uskolyt had an idea that might eventually enable generative artificial intelligence. As a researcher at Google in 2017, Uskolyt was trying to speed up the training of neural networks.
He proposed using a new way of interpreting data called self-attention, an idea that led to the Transformer, the neural network architecture that is the foundation of generative AI.
“In fact, Transformers have been in production at companies like Google for quite some time now, but they haven't received much attention,” Uskoreit told CNBC in a June interview. He said the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022 “has really put the spotlight on these applications.”
The idea for Transformer was first presented by Uskoleit and seven other Google researchers in the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need.” All eight authors have since left Google.
“Maybe Google hasn't been as bold as a much smaller company like OpenAI when it comes to applying this technology to a completely different kind of product,” Uszkoreit says. “That's something we have to fundamentally embrace, and in fact, in some ways we should be grateful, because Google provides the world with things that we all rely on every day.”
Jakob Uszkoreit, co-founder and CEO of Inceptive, is working to transform how medicine works using generative AI.
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Uskolyte left Google in 2021 to co-found Inceptive, a self-described biology software company. In September, Inceptive raised $100 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Nvidia to try to apply AI to drug development.
“We're focusing first on RNA, whose precise composition is designed with generative artificial intelligence, so that these molecules in a given biological system will ultimately exhibit behavior specific to that system,” Uskolyte said. “Indeed, we expect a taste for medicines that are much more in tune with biological systems than most existing drugs.”
To hear the full conversation between CNBC's Katie Tarasov and Inceptive CEO Jakob Uszkoreit, check out the video.