Insight
Branson warns biological models showing 0.9 accuracy usually contain underlying errors
“In biology, as you know, like, the best model you can build has, like, a figure of merit of accuracy, like.6, if it's .9, anything that looks great, there's something wrong.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Branson predicts every drug launched by GSK will have accompanying software
“So every, every software, every drug VSK will launch will have software that sits around it. I think that's gonna be true of everybody, and there's, we're going to see, there's software that will sit around every drug, and we'll say, you know, who should use i…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
GSK's active learning target discovery is 20% faster than random screening
“That's about 20% faster we've shown than doing a random screen.”
Insight
Branson notes simple ML models yield most gains over complex ones
“Basically the simple stuff gets you there, and for the extra five percent gained, you need all the extra complexity. I think that is still true now.”
Insight
Branson calls human outcome data big pharma's biggest competitive AI advantage
“Outcome data is, is, is the gold standard data to have, right? It's the rarest data that's really, like, one of the advantages of pharmaceutical companies have, because they can generate data in humans at scale in a safe, ethical manner.”
Assertion Supported
GSK made AI core to its strategy via in-house functional genomics
“They're fully investing in the things I thought were very important at the time, which was, you know, these large genetic databases coming online and functional genomics. So he was way ahead in the, in sort of the thinking about CRISPR and like the gene pertur…”
Insight
Branson applies Amdahl's law to companies balancing productive work and communication
“Armdahl's Law isn't just for CPUs, it's for companies, so that ratio of, like, computation to communication, right, is really important.”
Insight
Branson says big pharma's scale turns AI into an unstoppable juggernaut
“You're surprised at the amount of time it takes for a message to percolate, but eventually everyone, everyone gets behind it, you know, then you've turned the ocean tank and then it's this unstoppable juggernaut, right? Yeah. Because there's a lot of capital a…”
Insight
Branson argues AI's medical utility depends entirely on cheap measurement technology
“And so it's interesting because AI has become so useful because we've got so much more measurement technology, right? Cheap measurement technology. So we can do, you know, we can do generalized sequencing, cheap, we can do RNA seq, we can do the single cell ty…”
Insight
Branson notes high-dimensional biological data is useless without machine learning
“We've got more measurement technology, but it's in such high dimensionality on people that, like, you, I can't make sense of an array of, like, a whole bunch of expression changes which just fluctuate around baseline versus a disease patient. Right? Like, who …”
Opinion
GSK rejects AI biotech startups pitching only talent and algorithms
“And if your pitch is just like, oh, we've got smart people, give us your data, we'll do cool stuff. I'm like, well, I've got smart people too, right? That's not gonna happen.”
Insight
Branson argues random forests should be the baseline for all ML models
“They should be the baseline everyone should start with for everything, right? And you should always compare your information gain above a random forest that could be depressing for a long time.”
Insight
Branson warns small model improvements do not justify enterprise switching costs
“For a lot of people's stuff, the 10% difference, they're like, I don't care. It's not worth the cost of me buying it and stuff.”
Insight
Branson argues precision curves matter more than AUC for enterprise AI
“The precision curve, right is really where it's at over AUC, but you gotta work out what you need to be at to make it meaningfully different”
Insight
Branson advises enterprise AI startups to win over engineers, not just users
“Because often there's the people who use it in a company, and then there's the people who have to operate it and run it, and how do we control for model drift and everything else, and so you're selling to a user But the people buying it and installing it that …”
Insight
Branson urges tech executives to test internal tools to uncover bottlenecks
“I think you still have to kind of build things, and I think also to, it keeps you thinking about aspects, and I also think it also helps you know when you're, when, that your infrastructure is a company, right? If you're kicking the tires on it regularly, or i…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Branson predicts pharma will conduct fewer but more informative experiments by 2029
“So I think in five years time, what will happen is I think we'll be doing fewer experiments, but more informative experiments.”
Assertion Partly supported
Branson notes Relenza was designed using early computational drug discovery methods
“So, so, I was working with Joseph Aghese and Peter Coleman and Brian Smith, and these are the people behind the first neuro-interdates drive, which actually was designed actually with computation. So, they used a program called Goodford This grid to map the pr…”
