New Vaccines coming from covid experience

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mister_coffee
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Re: New Vaccines coming from covid experience

Post by mister_coffee »

One pretty straightforward way to think of modern neural networks is as universal function approximators.

Yes, the functions can be wildly nonlinear (and how that happens is both complex and kind of subtle) and have many thousands of dimensions in their inputs and outputs (sometimes hundreds of thousands). But if you give a neural network the same input you will always get the same output. And small changes in the inputs generally produce only small changes in the outputs.
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Re: New Vaccines coming from covid experience

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Yep. mRNA vaccines are a Big Deal largely because they can be manufactured to spec rather than grown. So their production can scale up very rapidly which will be very helpful when the next pandemic rolls over us.

Think about how many people would be alive today and how different the world would look if we had a vaccine in May or June of 2020 rather than in January of 2021.
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Rideback
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Re: New Vaccines coming from covid experience

Post by Rideback »

Project Next Gen just announced by WH. This is a BFD!

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/projec ... dium=email
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Re: New Vaccines coming from covid experience

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From Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps; and note his comment about how AI shortened the timeline: 'I should add this crystallization of proteins back in 2013 was painstaking, laborious, multi-year work that couldn’t be rapidly accomplished with the help of AlphaFold2, the AI platform developed by DeepMind that now rapidly (minutes to hours) and accurately predicts 3D structure from amino acid sequences.'

https://erictopol.substack.com/p/why-th ... dium=email
just-jim
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Re: New Vaccines coming from covid experience

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Related article - same publication.
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Vaccine for Heart Disease and Cancer:
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... the-decade
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mister_coffee
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Re: New Vaccines coming from covid experience

Post by mister_coffee »

Yes, we have the opportunity for a remarkable period of dramatic progress in our health and quality of life. But we need to persuade a lot of people that it is okay to live in the 21st century.

On AIs, yes, there has been remarkable progress after decades of stagnation and basically zero progress. But I think we all need to be careful to not overstate what has been accomplished or assume that the accomplishments on that pathway will lead to any specific result. Yes, GPT-4 and its siblings are remarkable, but what they are is basically very large predictive text models trained on enormous datasets (and at enormous expense, end-to-end training for a GPT-4 model costs over $40 million).

Many people tend to anthropomorphize the output from systems like ChatGPT and extrapolate very unlikely capabilities from their experiences with them. These systems don't **know** or **understand** anything in the ways we do, and they don't learn very efficiently at all. Basically any AI is learning a representation of its training data, but not necessarily a very efficient one. And AIs are far better at interpolation than extrapolation, which means if their inputs are far out of sample the results will be gibberish.

In my own practice, I mostly focus on Convolutional Neural Networks for recognition and detection. What I've observed is that the kind of AI you can run on a smartphone or a Raspberry Pi is approximately as "intelligent" as a bumblebee, and easily makes mistakes just like a bumblebee will. I also will note that a smartphone has a power budget thousands of times higher than a bumblebee -- there is that efficiency thing again.

There are enormous practical (and non-creepy) applications for this technology. But there are a lot of practical problems that need to be solved along the way, and honestly there is a crying need for a generation of experts who can best understand how this all really works and how to best exploit it.
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Re: New Vaccines coming from covid experience

Post by Rideback »

The CRISPR technology is particularly interesting and I follow it closely. I doubt most people have had the time or energy to delve into the intersection that is happening literally by the hour of AI and CRISPR.

Diagnosis is improving, the orphan diseases that historically have been underfunded for research or simply left without drugs to help may be helped. Alzheimer's, cancer, heart, kidney, Huntington's, Parkinson's, Sickel Cell...they're all seeing big advances.

With all that said, mankind is now facing the conundrums of moral and ethical choices of how to bring AI & CRISPR into our lives.
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New Vaccines coming from covid experience

Post by just-jim »

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Interesting read. New vaccines are in the pipeline for all number of things; cancer, HIV, RSV, etc etc. Made possible, partly, by the tremendous jump in technology from what was learned about making Covid vaccines.
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“We were anticipating the arrival of a golden era for vaccines before the pandemic, but like during a war, technology tends to develops a lot quicker during a pandemic. I guess a silver lining has been the rapid development of different vaccine technology platforms,” said Prof Brendan Wren, a molecular biologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... y-diseases
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I have a cousin, married to one of the top Virologists in the country - 40 years working on pediatric respiratory diseases and vaccines, including RSV. He has told me a little about how this is unfolding…..
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