While the term “biotechnology” was coined in 1919, “techbio” dates back roughly a century after that. Around 2019, the VC firm Artis Ventures set up a venture capital fund named Artis techbio with the aim of uniting software, computational biology, and drug development into a cohesive framework. The ambition behind this idea has sometimes surpassed…
This week in AI research: TSMC’s restrictions on AI chip sales to China escalate tech tensions
The US-China tech war is escalating on the silicon front. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world’s top chipmaker, will halt production of specific AI chips for Chinese customers, complying with intensifying U.S. efforts to restrict China’s access to silicon to drive its own AI research. This move, effective Monday, throws another wrench into the…
From Palantir to methane-hunting to organoids: Why this tech vet is building a lights-out lab to make drug discovery more like software development
Ari Gesher, a veteran technologist who helped shape SourceForge in its heyday and was a key player at Palantir, the publicly-traded big data analytics company, wants to build a fully automated “lights-off” lab for drug discovery at Parallel Bio. “I’m using our biologists to prototype what the scientific processes are, then we’re going to build…
From self-driving cars to an autonomous AI/ML analytical platform for drug discovery
What do frictionless parking experiences and life-saving drugs have in common? For data scientist June Guo, the answer lies in setting AI algorithms loose on vast troves of data. Before setting his sights on human biology, Guo worked at Metropolis Technologies, a company focused on transforming the parking experience through the use of advanced computer…