Recently I talked about how Pfizer, and most likely Moderna chose their vaccine design for the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, and how this would expand substantially. Now you can have it from Moderna’s own mouth. You can listen to the entire MIT podcast here.
In this bonus episode of the Me, Myself, and AI podcast, our hosts learn how Moderna used artificial intelligence to speed up development of the vaccine and how the technology has helped to automate other key systems and processes to build efficiencies across the organization. Dave also describes Moderna’s digital-first culture and offers insights around collaboration that can be applied across industries.
I highly recommend you listen to the entire podcast or at least read the transcription on the site. As you can listen or read, AI algorithms were front and center in developing the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine and they now went from 30 to 1000 viable mRNA vaccines per month.
As I criticized for over 2 years, having a background in some of these fields, their algorithms took science's biggest bait, or the group of data and AI scientists responsible for setting parameters used the wrong parameters, or were handed down the wrong algorithms.
You can read a longer article I published on Pfizer and their choice, and “the why’s” they did what they did here. This piece was just a “matter of fact” that both companies heavily relied on algorithms.
I wonder if the proline substitutions were chosen by the AI models or human experts… until the next articles.
I bet these assholes will blame AI for their fuck-up when litigation comes. Just watch.
With the amount of data both Moderna and Pfizer now possess, they could easily build the most powerful generative LLM's for vaccine and drug design on the planet, but I expect them to fuck this one up too.
When I was in college, I did some woodworking at the college shop. I bought some oak from a local milling operation. The company had, based on someone's college thesis paper, completely invested in a new type of wood dryer system that supposedly dried wood in 1/2 the time of the previous system. When I went to use that oak, it was actually dangerous, sort of exploded off the saw, as it was filled with internal stresses from being dried too fast. The company eventually went bankrupt, all for trying to leap ahead with untested tech. Sometimes the lessons you learn aren't in school itself. Wrong tech kills.
Of course, in that case they (unlike the US government) weren't actually trying to kill me, but the lesson stands.