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One of the inventors of the technology behind ChatGPT plans to use artificial intelligence to discover new types of medicine after raising $100m (£80m) from investors including the chip giant Nvidia.
Jakob Uszkoreit, one of a team of former Google scientists who developed the AI breakthrough in 2017, is raising the funds to develop “biological software” that could lead to new treatments.
His low-profile company, Inceptive, is one of a number of start-ups hoping to use generative AI to invent new types of drugs. The company designs new types of molecules and then works with major pharmaceutical companies to test them.
Nvidia’s venture capital arm, the Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, and Obvious Ventures, a prolific San Francisco venture capital firm, are among those investing, according to the Financial Times, which revealed the fundraising.
Mr Uszkoreit was one of eight scientists, mostly Google employees, who co-authored a seminal scientific paper that unveiled a computing model called a transformer, which has powered the rise of chatbots such as ChatGPT and image and video generation tools.
The technology was also used by the Google-owned AI lab Deepmind, which used it to develop a protein-folding program that promises to rapidly improve medical research.
All of the researchers have since left Google, and some ex-employees have claimed the tech giant’s culture meant it failed to capitalise on its early work in AI.
Inceptive focuses on generating new mRNA molecules, which formed the basis of the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. Mr Uszkoreit told the FT that Inceptive was working with a major pharmaceutical company to develop a new vaccine for an infectious disease.
Interest in using AI to develop new drugs has jumped in recent years, particularly with the recent investment boom driven by technologies such as ChatGPT.
However, experts have warned that the new technology may not lead to immediate results, since much of the work of developing new drugs requires lengthy laboratory testing and clinical trials.
Shares in British company Exscientia, which uses AI to develop new drugs, have fallen by almost 80pc since the company’s US listing in 2021, while shares in London-based BenevolentAI have fallen by almost 90pc since last year.