Two pitches that Nvidia's CEO will be making at next month's NVDA lovefest (Nvidia GTC Conference, March 17 - 21, 300,000 attendees in-person and online) are 1) sovereign AI, every country, even every city needs its own supercomputer powered by Nvidia chips and its own Large Language Model trained on those supercomputers and 2) digital biology - everything from rapid drug discovery to individually tailored gene therapy.*
And from Longevity.Tecnology, February 20:
French startup founded by former Google DeepMind talent aims to build first ‘universal AI foundation model’ for biology.
Paris-based AI startup Bioptimus has emerged from stealth, securing seed funding of $35 million to advance its mission to generate computational representations that capture the full diversity of biology.
The company aims to develop the first “universal AI foundation model” for biology, leveraging high volumes of diverse, multimodal, and multiscale data to provide a comprehensive understanding of biology – from molecules and cells to tissues and entire organisms. Should it be successful in its mission, a better understanding of biology could also help shed light on the mysteries of the aging process, which is still poorly understood.
Led by Professor Jean-Philippe Vert, Bioptimus has assembled a team of scientists, including experts from Google DeepMind and French TechBio company Owkin. The company will benefit from its close ties with Owkin, which boasts advanced data generation capabilities and federated global access to multimodal patient data from leading academic hospitals worldwide, coupled with a secure computing environment.
Vert, who is also Chief R&D Officer of Owkin and former Research Lead at Google Brain, said that AI was set to have a “profound impact” in biology....
