Letters
Knowing When You Need Help
AI Fund, the venture studio and investment firm that I lead, recently held a summit where CEOs and founders of portfolio companies shared ideas on topics from fundraising to building team culture.
Mar 30, 2022
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: AI Designs Chemical Weapons, AI Gains Cultural Awareness, New Chip Accelerates Transformers, Spotting Dangerous Mutations
AI Fund, the venture studio and investment firm that I lead, recently held a summit where CEOs and founders of portfolio companies shared ideas on topics from fundraising to building team culture.
Science
AI Designs Chemical Weapons: Researchers retrained a system originally designed to discover new medicines to show that it could, instead, generate molecular formulas for poisons.
It’s surprisingly easy to turn a well-intended machine learning model to the dark side. In an experiment, Fabio Urbina and colleagues at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, who had built a drug-discovery model to design useful compounds and avoid toxic ones, retrained it to generate poisons.
Hardware
Transformer Accelerator: Nvidia's H100 is Designed to Train Transformers Faster
Is your colossal text generator bogged down in training? Nvidia announced a chip designed to accelerate the transformer architecture, the basis of large language models such as GPT-3.
Tech & Society
Native Processing: Intelligent Voices of Wisdom Teaches Native Culture to AI
A group of media and technology experts is working to give AI a better understanding of indigenous peoples. IVOW is a consultancy that aims to reduce machine learning bias against cultures that are underrepresented in training data by producing knowledge graphs and other resources.
Science
Spot the Bad Mutation: AI Model Spots Disease Linked Protein Mutations
Every gene in the human genome exists in a variety of mutations, and some encode protein variants that cause cells to malfunction, resulting in illness. Yet which mutations are associated with disease is largely unknown.
Science
The Many Faces of Genetic Illness: Face recognition identifies childhood genetic diseases.
People with certain genetic disorders share common facial features. Doctors are using computer vision to identify such syndromes in children so they can get early treatment.