Is it easier to teach astronauts to drill or teach drillers to be astronauts?
My money is on Eli Lilly leveraging AI to develop drugs vs Anthropic becoming Eli Lilly. Obviously teaching drillers to be astronauts is the better movie though.
My money is on Eli Lilly leveraging AI to develop drugs vs Anthropic becoming Eli Lilly. Obviously teaching drillers to be astronauts is the better movie though.
It's always something I've hated, coming from software and working with experts. I always wanted to be the "software guy" who gets to learn the specialist engineering disciplines. It just felt like swimming upstream and the incumbent specialists always wanted to DIY.
Having said that, some subject-matter experts just don't have the stomach for it. They are so separated from software that they have a block to building even with AI. A good s/w-specialist pair is dynamite there.
The best places to work are ones with high mutual respect between the 'R' and 'D' of R&D. When either camp dismisses the value of the other and everyone stops giving a little to make the handoff easier it just makes everyone miserable.
There's very little mutual discussion, brainstorming, anything. The slowness inherit in building software before made those discussions almost necessary, now they're post-hoc criticisms (PR "review") rather than fulfilling collaborations.
It's fine from a technical sense, but I do wonder what it does for culture.
I used to work at startup that did video encoding. We had tons of computer vision scientists that refused to learn decent C++ coding practices. Their stuff never worked right and they didn't really contribute much. We also had a few scientists who were decent coders and pretty much all progress came from them.
I see the same with some data scientists. They want to do pure data science and refuse to do the coding to actually get their data. So they have to be spoon fed all the time and their progress is super slow.
Astronauts, drillers, AI researchers, drug developers...Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis can do it all!
It is not a profitable quarter.
That regulatory function is quite personal and hands on. It's relationships built up over months and decades. AI, almost by definition, cannot replace it or augment. Sure, faster, better. But even then that backlog will grow to meet any gains.
Source: I have done (and have family members that do) compliance and regulation for larger phramas, including drugs and instruments that you have had (with near certainty) your medical reports analyzed and produced by.
The regulations, liability, and stringency of procedure in pharmaceuticals and healthcare in general simply won't gel with the SV mindset of "move fast and break things"/"forgiveness is easier to get than permission". A University of Missouri pathologist working with Jon Carreyrou put a SV biotech darling in literal prison despite a huge valuation. That sort of accountability is the exact thing founders seek to avoid, not court.
(Also: Same site, but click on earnings instead of market cap).
I just thought Tesla was a good example here, of how innovation and speed of execution can enable a new entrant to outperform established competitors.
> (Also: Same site, but click on earnings instead of market cap).
Well yes, I'm not going to argue about that one, the market is the market...
Eli Lilly might be the experienced horse carriage operator to Anthropic as the Ford motor company here instead. Or Blackberry when the iPhone was announced.
The biggest advantage Eli Lilly has is in navigating the FDA regulatory process, and at present, US Federal regulations & bureacracy can be pretty easily managed by putting one of Trump's sons or friends on the board or giving a 'donation'.