From Microsoft’s big investment to Google’s big botch, to the big array of smarter services, AI is set to change pharma. Since I enjoy life from a comfy seat asymptotic to the people who change our world, I’ve asked three experts to chat about AI.
The Chat…
Me: What’s really going on here?
“To a certain degree you’re democratizing access to services,” Chirag Jay Patel. Chirag is an expert in next generation publishing and AI. He is responsible for partnerships for the R Discovery platform at Cactus. “Because it indexed Wikipedia, Google can list medical societies in the U.S.. ChatGPT shows me the top 50 societies by revenue or by the size of its member base.”
AI is the best form of democracy…
“There’s a lurking danger and modern consumers don’t understand it.” That warning comes from Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is an expert in digital traffic and ad fraud research. He started and runs FouAnalytics. “I’m a researcher. I search Google for multiple sources so I can find the right point. ChatGPT doesn’t cite sources. It wraps its summaries in prose so nice that people don’t question the results.”
AI in health, what could go wrong?
“AI could help patients. We have to make sure it does no harm.” Our updated Hippocrates is Donna Hunt Hodge. Donna is an expert in brand building and commercialization. She runs Janssen’s Retina Gene initiatives. “Clinicians and patients need real content from sources they can trust.”
How you train is what you get
We’ve come a long way since MovieFone had us press, “1” to buy tickets for Mission Impossible. Today’s AI can intuit what you want and answer it. “ChatGPT, in 50 words, introduce yourself…”
“I assist users in generating human-like text based on the prompts and inputs provided to me, and provide relevant and accurate information based on my training data and programming.”
We teach toddlers alphabets, numbers, shapes, and colors to start a lifetime of learning. GPT-3 has trained on billions of data points. Microsoft will open AI to an AI kimono of our emails, word docs, and slides. That means it could get a lot smarter a lot faster.
“We’ve indexed 100 million articles – 75,000 just on rare disease.” AI adds smarts for Chirag’s R Discovery application. Now, people can see ways articles across rare disease align. As they use the platform, the app can personalize experiences.
“AI can help us create a market analog as we go into rare space in gene therapy for the first time.” Like the game show, Jeopardy, form a question. Donna asked, “Did we miss something in old marketing data?” One biotech company uses AI to find new therapies in old clinical trial data.
“People need to focus on what machines can’t do… innovate.” Dr. Fou talked to his kids about not needing to memorize things. It’s the, “So what?” of it. This has played out before. We optimize process: hunter/gatherers, the Industrial Age, early office work. The next generation of platforms, companies, and products that win come from harnessing AI to create value.
Lightning Round
“I’ve used a lot of AI. ChatGPT is the best. It can write my emails in multiple styles.” – Chirag.
“Training AI with CRM sales force data could create a smart bot for brand sites.” – Donna.
“As much as training, AI needs a feedback loop to learn what’s good. Using what AI output people share on social media would be a great signal.” – Dr. Fou.
“AI could help find patients suffering from rare diseases.” – Donna.
“Bad actors can use AI to create fake news – quickly – stuff it into feeds, and get people to share it. I asked ChatGPT to write three paragraphs on why COVID is not real and why masks don’t work.” – Dr. Fou.
“Work with publishers to find insightful needles in the haystacks of their content. AI can organize content to build collections more smartly than taxons.” – Chirag.
“Save time. AI can collect and collate information like teams of interns.” – Dr. Fou.
“Our testing shows that human written work performs 8-10x better than AI generated text.” – Chirag.
“Use AI to analyze data from marketing programs.” – Donna.
“Generative text services could disrupt language editing. It’s the difference between translating languages instead of speaking them natively.” – Chirag.
“Human oversight, experience, intuition is critical.” – Dr. Fou.
Last words
Chirag – “This iteration of AI shows a lot of promise but, humans have to be involved in the process. AI is not there to replace your people. It’s there to help your people.”
Dr. Fou – “AI is spilling into the mainstream for the first time – this is when sea change events happen. The status quo won’t work anymore. If you do the mundane you will be replaced. If you move into the creative side, you will be fine. Every tool can be used for good and bad. Don’t go down the bad rabbit hole.”
Donna – “I’m very optimistic and I’m very cautious about AI and healthcare. We need to keep patients safe. We need to think about mental health. We have to keep AI real.”
Me – Well, I’m smarter for having heard three intelligent people chat about AI in healthcare. Here’s my take. Raising kids takes a village. AI’s village is all of us. We’re going to get out of it what we put into it. So invest it in wisely and be careful what you say around it.
