Biotechnology, Democratizing AI and Spinoza – Live and Learn #9
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with some bits and pieces on things happening at the intersection of biotech and AI, a video on Spinoza's philosophy, and an interview with Emad Mostaque, the founder of Stability AI. Enjoy.
✨ Quote ✨
Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call viriditas, and it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see.
– Kim Stanley Robinson – (source)
Links
Atoms are Local by Century of Bio. Biotech is a fascinating discipline right now, and a lot of things are happening that many people are unaware of. Complementing biotechnology with AI in the right ways leads to a future where "everything will grow on trees". A future where anything we would like to have can be created and grown from organic materials within our own homes. This piece dives into how such a world might look like and how companies are striving towards this future right now.
Metagenomic Atlas by Meta AI. Knowing the structure of a protein can help identify potential uses for it; therefore, the more proteins we know the shape of, the better. However, with current methods, analyzing all the proteins there are would take way too long to be practically infeasible. This paper developed a new method that can run protein shape predictions from DNA samples over an order of magnitude faster than the state of the art before. The AI models they developed can go from a DNA sequence to the full protein shape in a matter of seconds which makes running them on whole databases of DNA samples possible. This will unlock a lot of possibilities to discover new useful compounds.
Democratizing AI, an Interview with Emad Mostaque by Scale AI. The amount of data and computation necessary to build, train and maintain awesome models like ChatGPT, Dall-e, or AlphaZero are gargantuan and only a few big players in the field, like Microsoft, Google or Meta have the resources to do so. However, that's a very bad thing, considering the potential disruptions that breakthroughs in AI might have in the not-so-distant future. That's why Emad Mostaque founded Stability AI: A corporation that makes its research open source, so that everybody can help build this future and ensure it is beneficial to everybody. This interview dives into Emad's thinking and what they are doing at Stability AI to make his vision come true.
Spinoza – A complete guide to life by Then & Now. Spinoza argued why we should learn more about the world and why learning how the world works is the only ethical thing we can do in our lives. Knowledge, according to Spinoza, can lead to an overall happier life. This video dives into his main ideas. Overall, I love this channel. They dissect deep philosophical and political topics into beautiful, documentary-length, and well-researched videos. Somehow Spinoza is a philosopher that I didn't know much about until now. But after watching this video I want to check out his original works.
🌌 Midjourney 🌌
🎶 Song 🎶
Sehnsucht by Dario Lessing
I hope you found this newsletter useful, beautiful, or even both!
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Cheers,
– Rico