"It’s not about replacing scientists with decades of expertise—it’s about amplifying them." Thanks TECH WEEK by a16z for the great discussion with Benchling cofounder Ashu Singhal and other industry leaders! This is the future we're building towards: #AI for every scientist, breakthroughs for all.
Great conversation at the TECH WEEK by a16z AI scientists panel in SF! A few of my takeaways from a fun discussion with Jacob Borrajo, Ashu Singhal, Stefano Quintini, and Zak Doric, PhD around the theme of Human-AI partnership in drug discovery: ▪️ AI scientists can explore ideas at scale and reduce some of the toil around documentation and data munging. But they don’t yet have the decades of expertise required to make good decisions at every step of the drug discovery process. ▪️ By pairing AI scientists with veteran drug hunters, you get the best of both worlds. AI scientists can explore many ideas and then let the experienced scientists prioritize the best ones. Scientists can then collaborate with the models to design experiments that generate the highest quality data for both humans and machines to learn from. And in doing so, they teach the AI scientists some of their intuition in much the same way they would teach a junior scientist on their team. ▪️ This collaboration between human and machine brains both yields the best science and is also key to protect any emerging IP, as human guidance is currently required by the USPTO to file a patent. It’s not about replacing scientists with decades of expertise—it’s about amplifying them. I’m excited for the future that this panel is building towards, one where every scientist can 1000x the number of hypotheses they explore and ultimately increase the number of meaningful therapies our industry delivers to patients. Thanks to the other panelists for the thoughtful discussion and to a16z Bio + Health and Fenwick & West for hosting!