The Harry Glorikian Show Harry Glorikian

If you’re looking for help thinking about the implications of exponential change in all areas of technology, one of the best people you can turn to is Azeem Azhar. He's a writer, entrepreneur, and investor who publishes the incredibly popular and influential Substack newsletter Exponential View, which takes deep dives into AI and other subjects with world experts. In 2021 Azeem published a whole book along the same lines called The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics, and Society, and he joined Harry on the show in early 2022 to talk about that. This summer, the book came out in paperback—and just this month, Azeem worked with Bloomberg Originals to launch a limited-run TV show and podcast called Exponentially with Azeem Azhar. So it seemed like a great time to revisit Harry's 2022 interview, which resonates with current events even more now than it did when we first aired it.

Professionals in drug discovery, drug development, and healthcare may not grasp the scale of the change that’s coming to their business thanks to generative AI models like GPT-4. They need to get up to speed fast if they want to stay competitive and incorporate generative AI into their work in a way that’s effective and safe. Fortunately there are plenty of people in the life sciences industry thinking about how to help with that. And one of them is Harry's guest this week, Lana Feng.

She’s the CEO and co-founder of Huma.ai, and under her leadership the company has been working with OpenAI to find ways to adapt large language models for use inside biotech and pharmaceutical companies. GPT-4 and competing models are extremely powerful. But for a bunch of reasons that Lana explains in this episode, it wouldn’t be smart to apply them directly to the kinds of data gathering and data analysis that go on in the biopharma world. Huma.ai is working on that problem. They’re building on top of GPT-4 to make the model more private, more secure, more reliable, and more transparent, so that companies in drug development can really trust it with their data and not get tripped up by issues like the hallucination problem.

Harry's guest this week is Joe DeVivo, the new CEO of Butterfly Network. The company's goal is to make it radically easier for doctors or medical technicians to perform an ultrasound exam on any part of the body, and radically cheaper for a patient to get one. The companyt makes an FDA-cleared, handheld ultrasound scanner called the Butterfly iQ. The first big thing that’s different about the iQ is that it uses silicon-based microelectromechanical sensors, instead of a traditional piezoelectric crystal element, to generate and receive the ultrasound waves. That means the device is fully digital, rather than analog. The second big thing that’s different is that the iQ transmits the ultrasound data to a standard iPhone or iPad instead of a big, expensive ultrasound cart. The doctor or technician can see the live ultrasound image right on a handheld device, and use the image to aim the sensor correctly to get the best possible picture to make a diagnosis. All of that is bringing down the cost of equipping a clinic with ultrasound technology dramatically, and over time it should also bring down the cost of administering an ultrasound exam. It also opens up the possibility of adding AI assistance to the software, so that doctors or technicians can get usable images with less training. The net result is that Butterfly is making it economically feasible to use ultrasound for diagnostic imaging in a lot more places, including clinics in developing countries where ultrasound was out of reach before due to the high cost of the technology and a shortage of trained ultrasonographers.

This week Harry's guest is....Harry! We're flipping the script and giving Harry a chance to wax eloquent about AI in healthcare and drug research, the growing role of personal health monitoring devices, the unique features of the Boston life science ecosystem, the meaning of the recent downturn in biotech investment, the most common mistakes made by new entrepreneurs, and much more. This week's guest interviewer is Wade Roush, who hosts the tech-and-culture podcast Soonish and has been the behind-the-scenes producer of The Harry Glorikian Show ever since Harry started the show in 2018.

Harry's guest this week is Dr. Isaac Kohane, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the new book The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond. Large language models such as GPT-4 are obviously starting to change industries like search, advertising, and customer service—but Dr. Kohane says they're also quickly becoming indispensable reference tools and office helpmates for doctors. It's easy to see why, since GPT-4 and its ilk can offer high-quality medical insights, and can also quickly auto-generate text such as prior authorization, lowering doctors' daily paperwork burden. But it's all a little scary, since there are no real guidelines yet for how large language models should be deployed in medical settings, how to guard against the new kinds of errors that AI can introduce, or how to use the technology without compromising patient privacy. How to manage those challenges, and how to use the latest generation of AI tools to make healthcare delivery more efficient without endangering patients along the way, are among the topis covered in Dr. Kohane's book, which was co-written with Microsoft vice president Peter Lee and journalist Carey Goldberg.

In the same way that written English is built around an alphabet of just 26 letters, all life on Earth is built around a standard set of just 20 amino acids, which are the building blocks of all proteins. And just as we've invented special characters like emoji to go beyond our standard letters, it turns out that biologists can expand their repertoire of powers using non-standard amino acids—those that either occur rarely in nature, or that can only be made in the lab. GRO Biosciences, a spinout from the laboratory of the renowned synthetic biology pioneer George Church at Harvard Medical School, is one of the companies working to explore the exciting applications of non-standard amino acids (NSAAs), and Harry's guest this weeks is GRO's co-founder and CEO, Dan Mandell. He says NSAAs could help overcome some of the limitations that keep today’s gene and protein therapies from being used more widely, while also expanding the kinds of jobs that protein-based therapies can do.