Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. This is Bloomberg BusinessWeek with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Carol, this story crossing by Rachel Matt's just about one pm this afternoon. This is pretty cool. Open ai is releasing a free tool. It's aimed at making it easier for scientists to use chat GPT to draft research papers and collaborate with colleagues. It's part of a larger effort to position its chatbot as an aid for scientific work and discoveries. Okay, it's called Prism. Open ai is rolling it out today. It uses the company's GPT five point two AI model to carry out task related to writing
and revising academic work. A scientist, for example, might ask it to help improve the way a paper is written and find related papers to cite in their work, or generate a computerized version of a handwritten diagram.
Just be careful not to copy somebody else's work, or is gonna say, well, you won't be not good citations are important.
I think the uh administration ran into some issues with using AI to come out with some guidelines in recent months, and it was found that it's cited papers that don't actually exist.
Yeah, it's it's it's super interesting. I think we're finding our way. But I do agree, and I think there's a momentum of AI in general. What it couldn't do maybe for the healthcare space, for the science space. We have a great voice on this. We love touching base with her. Jenny Rook, founder and managing director of Genera Ventures. It's a VC firm. It invests in, it invests in having a tough I'm having a tough time on this Tuesday. I blame the snow and maybe being a little off.
She says, the quote next generation of companies at the convergence of technology and biology. This is what she invests in. Jenny, good to have you back with us. So talk to us about new year, maybe some new ideas, maybe some new momentum. Uh. The JP Morgan Healthcare Conference wrapped up earlier this month. You were there. Tell us what we need to know, especially for those who are listening and watching in terms of the investing landscape, trends, narratives in this space.
Sure, I'm happy to good to be back with you, Caroly and Tim. Yeah, it was a dynamic year for the JP morgan Bytech conference that happens every year here in San Francisco. It is always good sort of bell weather for how people are feeling going into the new year.
I would say the headline that I kept hearing in conversations around here was cautiously optimistic, which you know, I'll take it after the last couple of years, although I must admit that was a phrase that we said last year as well, and then twenty twenty five happened with all its uncertainties, but there was a different, probably different feel. There were more people here actually this year than last year.
Generally speaking, events were quite well attended, and I think there was a lot of energy around the very real impacts as you were just talking about, of AI on health and science, and also some of the shifts in the availability of funding, both public and private for advancing health care and science, actually along the lines of your previous guests. So I would say, in general, lots to be excited about, again, perhaps cautiously. Yeah.
We spoke to you know, just a couple of weeks ago from the JPM conference. We heard from some of the heads or chairs of the biggest pharmaceutical companies out there. Are you also seeing like the early stage stuff. Are you seeing a lot of opportunities there still? Because as we've spoke to you a lot about quite you know over the last year, a lot of that stems from academic research. There are questions about funding. We just spoke about it with Janet Lauren, you know, in these universities,
and that funding drying up from the federal government. Is that excitement still?
There?
Are the opportunities still there? Are you having a hard time picking and choosing which investments to make because there are a plethora of investments to make.
I think there are always going to be opportunities because there's so much we're still learning about basic science and
how to use it. And as we've been talking about the acceleration of the ability to get some data as a scientist, as a researcher, as a technology developer, as an entrepreneur, get that data, reincorporate anyone's thinking with the tools of AI, and come up with new ways to pursue either the business plan or the scientific research that Flywheel is spending faster with the assistance of AI and other kinds of connectivity and collaboration. So that's definitely happening.
I think One of the things we've talked about in our conversations in the past is while it was very much disruptive to people's expectations about where federal dollars were going to be coming from for advancing science, we've seen a couple of things. One the resilience of those driven, passionate researchers who are looking to get their work done one day, one way or another figuring out ways to get that funding done. As well as entrepreneurs. They tend
to be the grittiest and the most driven. So we're seeing in some cases this actually, perhaps counterintuitively, is creating a new category or more opportunities for the early stage investor, where perhaps a researcher who hadn't been thinking of commercializing their research is starting to think, well, is there an opportunity to bring this out in a way where I can access both commercial dollars and the funding that is available for advancing science.
Yeah.
I also think about, you know, how patient Jenny investors have to be for really seeing the AI payoff when it comes to you know, either biotech developments. We know some of this stuff takes time in a normal world, and we know AI I can certainly speed up things. But I'm just curious, does the time frame for figuring out developments in this area is it sped up because of AI or is it still going to take a while.
This is such an important point, Carol. We have to keep in mind that many of the accelerations that we're talking about that AI can bring to the practice of science is still happening at the beginning of a journey too.
For example, bring a new intervention or diagnostic product to market, and so perhaps it can help us come up with novel medicines or novel targets for medicines, but we're still looking at the beginning of the multi year, many hundreds of millions of dollars journey to bring a drug properly
through clinical development. So I think it is important to your point to temper our excitement about that potential impact with the overlay of the timelines that it takes to actually properly investigate and develop and launch medicines.
Very cool stuff I was thinking about too. We had a conversation with Kathy Wood and talking about AI certainly in healthcare and drug developments as well. Yeah, definitely bullish. So we highly recommend folks check out that conversation, but Jenny always loved touching base with you. Certainly an important area to have on our radar, and that of course was Jenny Rook, founder managing director of Generadventures. Good to check in with her, joining us from the West Coast, San Francisco,