AI, drudge work, & processes
Notes from a podcast with Moderna’s Dave Johnson
2 parts are especially good:
1) Dave:
"Usually how it works …is people doing a lot of work. And so what often happens is, folks will come to us and say, “Look, I’m doing this activity over and over. I would really love some help to automate this process.” And so, in that case, they’re thrilled."
"They don’t want to be looking at some screen of data over and over and over again. They want to be doing something insightful and creative. And so that’s where we really partner with them and take off that component of what they do."
Great AI products are most reliably about relieving drudge work.
2) Dave:
“Some folks talk about AI in the pharma space being like, “I just want an algorithm that can predict, from the structure of a small molecule, the efficacy in humans,” like that’s the entire drug discovery process. That’s just not going to happen; that’s completely unrealistic."
"So we just think about the fact that there are countless processes, it’s a very complicated process to bring something to market, and there are just numerous opportunities along the way. Even within a specific use case, you’re rarely using one AI algorithm. It’s often, “For this part of the problem, I need to use this algorithm, and for this, I need to use another.”
Effective AI is not a model in a jupyter notebook. But it's also not even a model that's been "deployed to production".
Effective AI is Software, with all the necessary pains and joys of designing, implementing, maintaining, and regularly updating or even overhauling it.
Such a great episode!