No Priors Ep. 29 | With Inceptive CEO Jakob Uszkoreit

"Biological Software" is the future of medicine. Jakob Uszkoreit, CEO and Co-founder of Inceptive, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors, to discuss how deep learning is expanding the horizons of RNA and mRNA therapeutics. Jakob co-authored the revolutionary paper Attention is All You Need while at Google, and led early Google Translate and Google Assistant teams. Now at Inceptive, he's applying these same architectures and ideas to biological design, optimizing vaccine production, and magnitude-more efficient drug discovery. We also discuss Jakob's perspective on promising research directions, and his point of view that model architectures will actually get simpler from here, and be driven by hardware. 00:00 - Creating Biological Software 06:54 - The Hardware Drivers of Large-Scale Transformers 14:32 - Challenges in Optimizing Compute Allocation 23:25 - Deep Learning in Biology and RNA 32:49 - The Future of Drug Discovery 41:41 - Collaboration and Innovation at Inceptive

Elad GilhostJakob UszkoreitguestSarah Guohost

Aug 24, 202335mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: August 24, 2023
Duration: 35m
Channel: No Priors
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

"Biological Software" is the future of medicine. Jakob Uszkoreit, CEO and Co-founder of Inceptive, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors, to discuss how deep learning is expanding the horizons of RNA and mRNA therapeutics. Jakob co-authored the revolutionary paper Attention is All You Need while at Google, and led early Google Translate and Google Assistant teams. Now at Inceptive, he's applying these same architectures and ideas to biological design, optimizing vaccine production, and magnitude-more efficient drug discovery. We also discuss Jakob's perspective on promising research directions, and his point of view that model architectures will actually get simpler from here, and be driven by hardware. 00:00 - Creating Biological Software 06:54 - The Hardware Drivers of Large-Scale Transformers 14:32 - Challenges in Optimizing Compute Allocation 23:25 - Deep Learning in Biology and RNA 32:49 - The Future of Drug Discovery 41:41 - Collaboration and Innovation at Inceptive

SPEAKERS

Elad Gil
host
Jakob Uszkoreit
guest
Narrator
other
Sarah Guo
host

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of No Priors, featuring Elad Gil and Jakob Uszkoreit, No Priors Ep. 29 | With Inceptive CEO Jakob Uszkoreit explores transformer pioneer builds 'biological software' to reprogram life with RNA Jakob Uszkoreit, co-author of the Transformer paper and CEO of Inceptive, discusses the origins of the attention-based architecture and why its success is tightly coupled to modern accelerator hardware and community optimism. He argues that future AI progress must tackle elastic compute—models that dynamically adjust computation to problem difficulty and input complexity. Uszkoreit then outlines Inceptive’s vision of treating RNA as biological bytecode and medicines as compilable programs, using large-scale deep learning and custom assays instead of full mechanistic biological understanding. He suggests this black-box, end‑to‑end approach could dramatically expand the reach, scalability, and sophistication of medicines, especially mRNA-based therapeutics and vaccines.

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