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You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenovek on Bloomberg Radio.
Garbage in, garbage out.
What could you be talking about, mister Stenevak.
Well, it's like you know computer science term from back in the day, but we talk about it a lot with AAI, like if data that goes into something is flawed, the data that comes out is flawed. It's only as good as the data that goes in.
Yeah, we do talk about this in the context of artificial intelligence hallucinations. It's like when an LM gives you an answer that you know is totally off base, or gives you a picture image that's way off the mark as well.
Sorry, I was just thinking to my friend, like, actually asked for an invitation to want you go on to create an invitation for a Halloween party, and he was like he wanted the image generator to be to really mess it up, like.
Oh totally.
He's like, no, make it more messed up, mess it up even more.
Oh yeah it did.
Yeah, sometimes it does what it tells you to do.
Oh yeah, it worked.
Now I'm curious. Tvd'll find it one. I bet she's AOKI thinks about this stuff a lot. Not the halloween part of this, but you know, the hallucination stuff. She's the founder and CEO of bio Render. It's a company that creates software to generate scientific images and illustrations. It's important that those are accurate. She was formerly the lead medical illustrator for National Geographic. She did that for a decade. She joins US from Toronto. She is welcome to the program.
I'm by a very interesting company. We don't talk about this part of AI a lot. You've got this recent partnership with Anthropic, the maker of the Claude LM. You have this incredible background Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, a dual BFA and fine Art and pre med from Queen's University. Why is scientific imaging important in the context of AI.
Yeah, Firs, thank you for having me, Carly and Tim, and you know, for science in particular, accuracy is really paramount, and so we're really excited to partner with companies like Anthropic because this is just actually one big step in making AI safer and more reliable for science. You said that you know your friend made some Halloween invites or garbage in garbage oe and that, and that truly is the case right now. It really doesn't do scientists work justice.
How bad the state of bioimages are today and actually the you know, Dario Nthropic CEO said that AI could compress the next fifty to one hundred years of biological progress into just five to ten, which means that the bottleneck really ships from computation to human comprehension.
Do you talk about Dario Amiday, I'm sixty minutes last night. Yeah, I've interviewed him before over in the in March in San Francisco. Do you believe him? Do you believe Do you agree with him?
I do? I do, and I agree with him in that we know that AI is great at helping with discoveries written form, and I think you'll agree that we're still not quite there with making visuals, particularly in science where it matters so much to be accurate. We've seen horrific diagrams of you know, legs with extra bones or maybe less obvious mistakes, but you know, more dangerous ones
are like protein folding the wrong way. It can actually mean the difference between a functioning cell in Alzheimer's disease, or even like one arrow moving in the wrong direction and about metabolic pathway could mean that, you know, we're feeding the tumor instead of starving it. And for buyer renders, you know, it turns out that this is exactly what
AI needed. We've been spending the last eight nine years building the world's largest library of expert expert vetted biovisuals, and we're very proud to be sort of the trusted source now, the foundational layer for going forward. You know, all the frontier models where accuracy is really non negotiable in science.
Well, tell us a little bit about your company in particular what you're doing and this idea of again, these are some of these things I feel like we just take for granted images within science, right or medicine. But tell us about the need to have these images make you know, and are they constantly being updated, Like, give us an idea of what you guys are doing and what we need to understand about medical imaging, not MRIs, but just understanding everything and anything that's in the body.
Yeah, and that's a great point. You MRIs can take us to a certain point, but at the end of the day. The body is very complex, surgical fields are very bloody. Photos don't cut it, and so we have to rely on a little bit more of I guess artistically licensed rendered graphics and bio renders, a software that help scientists create beautiful biological diagrams really quickly. You can think of us as sort of the canva or figma for biology for those folks that aren't familiar with the
scientific graphics world. So you can imagine a scientist coming in. They drag and drop like an anatomically correct brain, for example, onto the canvas. You can zoom in and then look at the details of a brain cell interacting with a tumor cell, and then you can zoom in even closer and show the biochemical reactions happening within the brain cell.
But you can see how quickly it's getting very technical and complex, and before bio under scientists we're actually using and they still do believe it or not, primarily PowerPoint of all tools. So they spend you know, days, sometimes weeks just trying to create one image with you know, like the circles and squares and the lines and arrow shapes, and so we thought, you know, there's got to be
a better way. So my co founders and I, Ryan Katty and I launched by a Under about eight years ago, hoping to solve this communication gap for scientists.
Who are your customers and how do you guys make money?
We do make money.
Yeah, yeah, we've been lucky to be profitable pretty early. Actually, it was very fortunate that the scientific community saw the need and just up to and our customers are primarily researchers, including leaders. Actually they're in there making PowerPoint diagrams. Hopefully not much longer if these biorender in pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, academic institutions, and even the publishing world.
Yeah, I'm curious about copyright with this. There's an article in Chemistry World from just about a year ago about how thousands of published studies could contain images within correct copyright license licenses, and they mentioned some biorender images created by biorender. Have you guys figured out the copyright issues in terms of what you're looking at and then what you're producing.
Yeah, it's a great question. I think. You know, at the end of the day, we have to shift the narrative to away from sort of the copyright or it's sort of the antiquated era of you know kind of who published it first. We're really trying. Our mission is to empower the world to communicate science and understand it faster through visuals. And so what's happening actually now in our library is scientists. We have four million plus users on our platform. They've been knocking down our doors wanting
to share their diagrams in our community library. They say they don't care if scientists you know, rip it apart and use it. They just feel so compelled to change the narrative and change the status quo of how science is communicated today that they are willing to share the work that they do environ render back into the community. So it's almost looking more like instead of the Canva
or Figma, more of the GitHub or even Wikipedia. Because they share their work back into our library and either we spot errors or the communities quick to jump on those errors, we update those and then get back upload into the repository. So we're kind of shifting the focus away from you know who said it first, to let's be open and share our work and really further neck celebrate science.
Yeh, super interesting. Hopefully we can come back and continue this in the future. She is AOKI founder and CEO bio Render, joining us from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.