No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups - What's for Dinner? AI-Driven Commerce with Instacart CEO Fidji Simo

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Fidji Simo, the CEO of Instacart and co-founder of Metrodora Institute, a medical center and research institute for neuroimmune axis disorders, shares her personal journey from growing up in France, to leading the Facebook app, to becoming a wartime CEO. Fidji talks about the future of Instacart, their AI strategy, how the current era of AI is different from prior ML waves, and the impact of LLMs in commerce, robotics and healthcare. She also shares how she earns followership from her teams. ** No Priors is taking a summer break! The podcast will be back with new episodes in three weeks. Join us on July 20th for a conversation with Devi Parikh, Research Director in Generative AI at Meta. ** No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode. Show Links: May 31, 2023: Instacart users can now plan meals using AI - Fast Company Profile May 13, 2023: Instacart CEO Fidji Simo makes groceries personal. Now she’s doing the same for women’s health December 2, 2021: Rapid Response: Re-founding Instacart, w/ first-time CEO Fidji Simo | Podcast: Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman Metrodora Institute Fidji Simo’s LinkedIn Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Fidjissimo Show Notes: [00:01] - Leading With Impact and Authenticity [11:48] - Implementing AI [17:28] - Future of Grocery Shopping With AI [25:38] - AI in Advertising and Commerce [32:54] - Metrodora: AI in Biotech and Healthcare [34:18] - The positive impact of AI, mitigating harm & role of regulations

Welcome to No Pryors. Today we're speaking with Fiji Simo, the CEO of Instacart, the leading grocery technology company, and co-founder of the Metro Dora Institute, whose mission is to cure neuroimmune access disorders. She's also the former leader of the Big Blue app, Facebook. Instacart is transforming the way we shop, making it possible for millions of busy people to get the groceries they need from the retailers they love. We're really excited to explore Fiji's founding of Instacart, their use of AI, and the impact of AI on commerce and healthcare.

Fiji, welcome to No Priors. Thanks for having me, Sarah and Yelad. Let's start with some personal background. You've been a star leader in technology for a long time from strategy at eBay to meteoric rise to product and eventually beloved leader of Facebook and now CEO of Instacart. That is a wide range of different things.

What's driven your career decisions? Wow, that's a hard question to start with. I think it sounds cliche, but it was all about where could I have impact on problems I deeply cared about. And I always say that I am a pragmatic technologist. And what I mean by that is that I love technologies that solve real problems for real people. And eBay was a good example of that. You know, when I joined the company, I was kind of in love with this idea of like all of these like communities of collectors exchanging goods, but really exchanging their passion.

And I was fascinated by that. And then, you know, my transition to Facebook was very similar. I was an immigrant in the U.S. And I was starting to see that it was so much easier to stay in touch with my family back in France, thanks to Facebook. And then transitioning to Instacart was kind of similarly about the mission. You know, I saw the idea of connecting people to the retailers they love so that they can enjoy the food they love and spend more time with their family was so. critical and food is, you know, one of the most important things in our lives. And so it felt like I could have a big impact that as well. Yeah. Amazing. I remember what an impression you made on

me when we first met when you're at Facebook, like you are very French, you wear lipstick and heels. You've led some of the most iconic products and companies in the tech world, but you don't subscribe to some of the, let's say, Silicon Valley monoculture. And you were clear, very conscious of that. Like, why is that important to you? Or how do you think of about, like, a cultural image and how you present as a leader? Well, you know, I've been French since I was born. I have been wearing lipstick and high heels since I was 12. So it is such a big part of me that it was never a conscious decision.

It was just about being me. And then when I arrived in Silicon Valley, a lot of people were commenting on that. And I was, like, pretty surprised because, you know, that was just me being me. And they were telling me, well, you know, especially as you move into product development, you really need to blend in with the engineers. So like remove the makeup, tie up your hair, start wearing a hoodie. And I did that for one day at Facebook. No one recognized me.

I would pass into a hole with no one to sit high. And the reality is that it felt like a lot of effort and work not to be you. And when I thought about it, I realized like, you know, if I have a lot of effort and energy to put into something, I'd much rather put it into building amazing products than trying to shape myself into something I'm not. And so, you know, I decided to embrace the French accent, embrace the heels and all of the things. And, you know, people around like adapted to it and then got used to it. And that was not a problem anymore. So, you know, better to be you basically. I asked a mutual friend of ours, Ravi Gupta, what I should ask you.

And he said that you are, you know, a very, very good leader with tremendous loyalty from your people while still being really tough. His suggested question was, how do you earn followership as a leader? Oh, that's a good question. I'm not surprised Ravi would ask that. I think, you know, I tell my leaders when I start, you know, working with them and I did that when I join Instagram, that I want to be, like, I want them to look back and realize. that I was a big accelerator in their career. And I'm telling them that to play that role, like it's a partnership, obviously they have to want that.

And for that to happen, it's going to mean two things. It's going to mean that I am going to hold them to a very high standard and give them a lot of tough feedback and help them meet that standard. But it's also going to mean that I'm going to be there backing them up every step of the way and being in their corner and wanting them to succeed, like no one else has wanted them to succeed before. And so I think, you know, it's not for everyone. Like there are some people who are like,

whoa, that sounds way too stressful. Thank you very much, lady. I'm going to opt out. But that's actually a good, you know, a good thing because like I don't think you need to be necessarily a leader for absolutely everyone. You like you pick your team and they pick you. And the people who like that end up being people who want to excel.

but want to excel through a leader that, like, is going to back them up, is going to be compassionate, he's going to create enormous safety for them to stretch themselves and potentially fail. And when that happens, you know, across many people in the team, you end up creating exceptional results because everybody kind of is in this mindset of like doing the best work of their lives. I imagine becoming CEO of Instacart at the time. time you did having to, like, you know, learn to be CEO, build that followership,

recruit the people you need, but also at a time of like massive, somewhat unexpected growth for Instacart and becoming critical infrastructure with the COVID-19 pandemic was a lot. How did you react to all of that? How did the pandemic change the company? Yeah. I mean, what do you mean, sir? It was a total walk in the park. It must have been chill.

Very, very chill. Well, listen. And first of, 10 years at Facebook prepares you for a lot. So I would credit that experience with, you know, me being ready to handle a lot of stuff. I would say, you know, I joined Instacart in 2021. And it was a very interesting time because the company had Forex the year before. We were in the midst of just absorbing all of the demand from customers, completely new habits, much larger team all of a sudden that we had to hire.

But at the same time, there was also this question mark on, is Instagram going to be just a pandemic darling, a, you know, one-trick pony, and are people just going to go back to their, like, usual way of doing things? And the company is just not going to maintain that. And, you know, fast forward a couple of years, clearly we have continued to grow during this time. And clearly, these habits are here to stay. But what you do during times like that is, like, you need. to go back and focus on mission and vision. And so I spent a lot of my time really painting the picture for the company of what that company could be.

And we even did like a full day called the Vision Summit where everybody needed to be on the same page on the fact that Instacart had become critical infrastructure that came with a lot of responsibility. Instacart was also a retail enablement company, meaning that we weren't just building the Instacart app. we were actually building technologies for our grocers, you know, when you go to Publix.com, Kroger.com, schnecks.com. Like, that's into technology that's powering a lot of that.

And that it represented a huge, you know, endeavor that would give us, you know, a lot to do over the next 10 years, but a very big opportunity. And so you have to get people to rally again after like a massive period of growth like that to figure out what is the next mountain, what is the next thing. that we're going to all go accomplish together. I guess related to that, it feels like one of the next mountains that you all are conquering has to do with the incorporation of AI into your product. And obviously, you care more about how the product impacts the users, but I'm a little bit curious, you know,

when did Instacart start focusing on AI and ML? And how do you feel that this wave of generative eye differs? Yeah, as you know, it's interesting because obviously AI is having a big moment, but Instacart has been focusing on AI since the very beginning. Like, if you think about it, we are fundamentally a search engine, we do a billion searches a month, a quarter, sorry, and you know, it's all powered by AI. Every time a shopper goes to the store and a product is not on the shelves, we suggest

replacement. We have suggested a billion replacement at this point, and like that's all powered by AI. The way in which we match shoppers to go to specific store, all powered by AI. So the list goes on. But I think the thing that's changing now with. is generative AI is that we are finally at a point where we can answer people's questions using natural language and the way they've been asking themselves these questions before. If you take a step back and you think about commerce online, it is very bizarre that we have

forced human to train themselves to express their commerce needs in the form of keywords. I mean, people don't think about like, you know, how to put digital. on the table for the week in terms of, like, cilantro, eggplants, sour cream, which is exactly what they're currently typing on Instagram right now. Instead, what they think about is, like, I have a budget of 300 bucks. I have to put, you know, X meals on the table. My daughter is lactose intolerant. We traditionally eat Mediterranean food, and I have a set of recipes that I always cook, but I'm open to suggesting, like, to trying out a new one, like, let's figure it out, you know? And that's the way in which, you know, like people ask themselves this question,

and therefore that's the way software should answer them. And to me, the thing that's most exciting about this new wave of generative AI is that we can finally match the answers that we give people to the way they ask themselves these questions. Yeah, it makes out of sense, you know, there has been this sort of shift in terms of what the underlying technology can do. And I feel like so many people just kind of extrapolate, hey, this is just the same AI curve as what we did with CNNs and RNNs and all this sort of prior waves. But in reality, it's a new technology discontinuity with the new underlying model and new capabilities. How did you get the team to start thinking in terms of those capabilities?

Because I feel that often when enterprises now adopt generative AI, some of them don't actually realize that it can do dramatically new things. Yeah. So a couple things. First off, like, it goes back to my philosophy as pragmatic technologists. I don't get enamored with the tech. I get enamored with what he can do. And so I actually, the prompt I gave the team was,

what are the problems we've always wanted to solve for our users that we can now solve so much better? And I see so many companies like coming at it from the point of view of like, do we need an AI roadmap? And I'm like, no, no, no, you need to figure out, like, what is the biggest problem you're trying to solve? And now can this new tool help you solve this problem in a completely different way?

And so that was very much the prompt. More tactically, though, we have had two approaches. One approach is a centralized approach. So under our chief architect, we now have a centralized team that is really going deep in understanding these technologies and trying to figure out what can be done that couldn't be done before. And then we have a federated approach, which is really about like taking some of these learnings and then making sure every team uses AI. And I think that has served us well to have this combo because you can't expect every engineer to go super deep to understand everything that's going on. But at the same time, if you keep generative AI just in a centralized team, it's not going to impact all of your products. So you really need the combo of the two to make that happen.

And do you have that, I guess from a tactical perspective, you know, I've seen some companies packathons where they just say, okay, this week, everybody's going to experience this technology just so that people get that intuition because I think the intuition is missing. And I've seen some companies have the sort of consultants who will drop in a different product theme and try and discuss what could they actually do with the technology or what does it enable and give some almost like very fast demos on it. Is there anything sort of tactically that you all did along those lines? Yeah, we certainly, we did a big agathon focused on that. And again, like the prompt wasn't just use generative AI. It was like take all of the problems we're already trying to solve and figure out if

if generative AI can solve them way better. and that generated a lot of great ideas. And then we have this model, because we have this kind of centralized team that we call CARTII, these people get pinged all the time by the rest of the company to kind of advise on how to deploy some of these things. We've also deployed an internal assistant called Ava so that all of our engineers can leverage the GPT4 models in a lot of what they're doing, but do that in an assisted way that helps them figure out how to integrate that.

So that has also been very helpful. And the thing also is, like, it reminds me a lot of, like, the, like, transition to mobile. I was, when I was at Facebook, I was put in charge of monetizing ads on mobile right at the time where there were all of the headlines post IPO saying, like, Facebook will never monetize mobile. Mobile is too small of a screen to have ads. Like, you know, you remember that. And the reality is that, like, you know, there were a lot of companies that were trying to

takes the desktop ads and just like shrink them to a mobile screen. And instead, you know, what we came up with was ads in Newsfeed, which was a completely different paradigm. And I use that a lot internally to how people understand that being AI native is going to require like really rethinking from the ground up, how you use these technologies, not like trying to fit them within your existing paradigm. And I'll give you a very concrete example. We recently launched Ask Instacart, which is a way to like, you know, ask questions, like, you know, what are the best sauces to grill my chicken and things like that.

And there was a lot of debate on like, should it go into the search box or not because the search box is sacred, you know, on a commerce site, like you type keywords, like people are not going to know what to do if we start putting questions. Let's put it as a separate thing. And then it's like, no, actually, if you were rebuilding commerce from scratch, that search box would be the place where you start asking questions, it shouldn't, like, we wouldn't, like, think of it as a keyword search box. And so these are the micro decisions that are actually big ones to train the company that we need to disrupt ourselves and the prior paradigms in order to be truly AI-native. Can you describe why you guys did an internal assistant versus just saying everybody, you know, go hit chat GPT on your own or whatever and sort of what's been

interesting from a productivity perspective so far? So we just released that so hard to know on productivity, but it was a lot about like, you know, making it more accessible and making it easier for engineers to kind of deploy these things as a bunch of like keyword shortcuts and just making like the interface very user-friendly so that engineers would feel like it's just a core part of their work now. The thing I would say about productivity is that, you know, it's a, early to be able to measure any of that, but I think it's going to impact productivity well

beyond engineering. A lot of people are talking about making software development easier, but I'll give you some other examples, like our marketing team, for example, created an entire library of animated characters using AI and using, you know, limb mirroring technology and things like that. And now we have like 200 plus, you know, characters and animation that we can use in market. That's huge. That would have cost a ton of money if that was to be done, you know, not using AI through an agency. Our legal team has like used AI to figure out like the, you know, how to detect the specific terms that the custom terms that we have with specific retailers so that we can track that in a much better way. Like all of these things, they seem much more minor than, you know, launching a fancy new AI thing.

But they actually make the lives of each team way better. And I think it will create a lot more satisfaction with the job. Because when you think about it, like no lawyer will tell you, yeah, going through a thousand documents to look for custom terms was a highlight of my day. And the fact that AI can actually do that for them, summarize that for them, that means that we're going to get the best out of our people and we're going to remove a lot of the more minute tasks.

Are there any other sort of big areas that you've seen either impact productivity or the customer experience or things that are coming that you can talk about that you're just excited to be launching? I know that you did things, for example, the chat GPT plugin and you were very early there. I'm just curious if there's other parts that are sort of exciting and on your roadmap. Well, there's so much. I think the chat GPT plugin was a great example because it allowed us to start to see how people were using these things. And again, the questions are, you know, fantastic because right now, Instacart is really a tool as of today that is very, like, bottom of the funnel. You have to have already decided, like, that you want grocery delivery, that you know what to eat, like all of these things. Whereas when you look at the chat GPC plugin, it starts with like, I have a birthday party.

I don't know which snacks to get, you know, like there's a lot of like intent and different occasions that we can tap into. and serve better because we can capture intent in a very different way. And so I'm very excited about that. And I think we're reproducing a lot of these experiences with Microsoft Bing, with Google Bould, and hope to be kind of the layer of conversion between bits and atoms. Because the way I kind of see this trend of generative AI is that everything software is going to become a lot easier and lower barrier to entry. but the translation between software and atoms is still very hard.

And the fact that Instacart has aggregated, you know, 80,000 stores, more than a thousand retailers means that we can create these magical experiences where you ask the software, you know, things in a natural language, and food shows up at your door in two hours. Like, that's pretty incredible. And so we're really doubling down on that. And then you ask kind of what's coming in the future. In the future, I want to make that available kind of.

as a platform because you could imagine any nutrition app, any apps that's doing like anything that has to do with food or even commerce tapping into this network and making it available to like basically turn intent into things being like showing up at your daughter in two hours. So we're very excited about that. And then longer term, I think it's all about like how do we answer all of the questions that people ask themselves. And the thing I would highlight is that it requires these large language models, but it also requires having really unique data.

And the fact that we have an incredible catalog, the fact that we have billions of data points on what people need, that's what gives us our strengths. And we're marrying the strengths of these incredible data with these large language models. And that's what's turning into really unique experiences. And so my advice for any companies just really, thinking about your data infrastructure and the unique data sets that you bring to bear in

this new world that can create these delightful experiences. Yeah, that makes sense. I guess related to that, given that you're a real world company, a place for AI perhaps has shown a little bit less progress than the recent burst of LLMs is in things like autonomous vehicles and self-driving in terms of drones, delivery, automated picking. How do you think about the more sort of real-world robotic side of this? And when do you think that's coming? yeah we've been following this incredibly closely as you can imagine and you know my take is if we were starting from scratch like rebuilding the grocery industry from scratch we would probably not rebuild it the way it is there will probably be fewer like stores the way they

are there will probably be more dark automated stores but the reality is that we're not starting from scratch and when you think of instacart like we have a network of 80,000 stores these retailers are already paying a fixed cost on all of these stores. So it is actually incredibly efficient to be sending people to these stores, like these retailers get incremental demand on top of that fixed cost pace, and these stores are very close to the customer. And so a big part of why these kind of automation initiatives have failed is not because the technology is not good and not there.

It's because the economics are actually very hard to make work. Like, if you want to have, like, a very large, you know, automated warehouse, you kind of need to put it further away from the customer so that you can aggregate all of these orders. Now you're talking about next day delivery instead of same day delivery, and we all know that customers want speed. And so you end up in a situation where, yes, like you have great automation, but that's not reducing costs and that's not improving the customer experience. So back to my point on pragmatic technologies, there are some technologies that are great. but if they don't help with either cost or customer experience, you know, they are not going to get mass adoption anytime soon. Can you describe what you guys are doing with the connected store effort and caper carts?

Because that's a different direction of like, you know, more extension into the real world. Absolutely. So the thing we realize is that the grocery industry is in the middle of this massive digital transformation. And that digital transformation is not just happening online. It's also happening inside the stores. and growthers really turn to us as the partners that can deliver them the best technology solution during that transition. And so when I join, I think within a month of me joining, I made the acquisition of

cable carts because they are basically smart cards where you can put products inside the cart and using computer vision and AI, of course, the product is automatically detected and then you can check out from the court directly. And so these kinds of technology, whether it's K-Percarts, whether it's scan and pay from a mobile phone, these kinds of technologies are really helping growers embrace that digital transformation are helping connect and bridge online and offline because we think that we actually have data that shows that customers who are omnichannel customers are more valuable than the online-only customer or the offline-only customer.

and so that enriches the store experience and also makes customers more likely to use that retailer across those channels. So we're really excited about that. We have a keeper cart rolled out at Kroger, Sobees, Wakefern, and it's a pretty magical experience and it's not just the part of us skipping checkout. It's a part where you have a screen in front of you,

and now if you dropped a particular item into your cart, we can suggest a related dressing, and we can tell you which. to find that dressing in and we can show you which savings you're getting and you can manage your budget on that screen. It's a really rich experience that stores are missing today. And I think that's going to be, you know, over the next five years of future of grocery shopping. I have to ask because you have multiple different experiences that are really deep and interesting in advertising from Facebook to what you're doing with retailers and CPG brands today. If you zoom out, what

predictions do you have for the impact of AI on advertising? Oh, I think it's going to be fantastic for ads. I think it's really about much more personalization and really like this kind of ideal that, you know, you're going to get the perfect out at the perfect moment for you. I think it's also going to be an explosion in creative when you think about all of the variation of creative that can be creative now so that, again, we match the right. right person to the right user, like, that's going to be just incredible. And that's going to, again, make advertising a lot more relevant.

And then the other thing is that I think advertising fundamentally follows the consumer product and the consumer use cases. I mean, that was one of our guiding principle at Facebook. And because we're going to see such an explosion of new consumer experiences, I think as a result, we're going to see new placements for ads that are going to be interesting. So, for example, we talked about, you know, our chat GPT plugins, we talked about Ask Instacart. Like, it is a very obvious place to start putting some sponsored contents that if you're asking, you know, what are the, like, best dairy free snacks for my kids, you know, we can show you organic results, but we can also show you some sponsored results there. And these are placements that are, you know, going to be really interesting for advertised up into because, again, there's a much clear.

our expression of intents and just a keyword and things that didn't exist before. So I'm really excited about that new wave and making that as relevant for people as possible. One of the things that people are talking about, I guess, related to both advertising, but also more generally in terms of e-commerce and shopping, is that the way we think about information, delivery, and transactions in the web over the next five, 10 years may change dramatically. So basically, everybody is eventually represented. by some form of agent, and you tell that agent, go and buy me these clothes or go and find

these things from you, go and do these things for me. How does that impact all this? How does that impact advertising? How does that impact commerce? Or is it so far in the future that it's not worth thinking too much about today? I actually think that it will have a lot of positive impact on commerce. Because again, like, first off, it's going to make people a lot more, either more productive or have more free time, which always leads to good things. Like a lot of these tasks are tasks that people would rather not be doing. Like, you know, there are some commerce tasks that they love,

like, you know, browsing clothes, guilty as charge, or, you know, like types of commerce that are like that mixed with entertainment. And I fully expect that for these, we're going to make things even more entertaining in the future of AI. And then for the things that are absolute like chores, these are the things that we're going to be able to automate a lot more. And so I think that's going to lead to really good results. The thing that has frustrated me the most with, in fact, Instacart is that it is an app that when you look at it today is fundamentally a utility. It's very transactional.

You just like type keywords, add to a cart, it shows up at your door. It shouldn't be the case. Who is one of the most inspiring things? It's like, it's one of the things that connects humans. It's one of the ways in which we celebrate, in which we show love. In fact, people spend more time watching food contents than ever cooking it. And so, you know, that tells you that there's such an opportunity for, like, making this thing that everyone can see the chore of, like, grocery shopping, making it a fun moment

where you discover new recipe, where you get excited about what you're going to cook this week, where you discover a new snack, that's going to be like the highlight of your week. Like that these are the opportunities that I think are going to be, you know, pretty amazing. And I believe, like you mentioned advertising, and I believe that advertising thrives in more immersive, more inspiring environments. And I don't see the conversational nature of an agent taking away from that. On the contrary, I think this conversational nature is going to be more engaging than a very bare-bone search engine that we have today.

Yeah, I definitely think there's some division even between, as you said, like the different, in each category of commerce, like that there's a piece of that commerce that is, I don't know, the operational toil of being alive. And then there's a piece of it that's fun, right? So if you look at food or, you know, I have two young girls, right? Like you can think of like parallel tasks here where 80% of the food I am eating. I'm like, okay, like there's an optimization, right? Like, you know, there's a, I'm home this night or my husband is home this night.

We want to eat relatively healthy. Like, there's some distribution of like proteins and veggies. We want to try to hit. And, you know, these are the things I know how to cook or somebody knows how to cook. And then there's like 10% of the time where I am, I have this ritual I do with my startup companies where, you know, you hit 5 million of air are and I'll cook you in the leadership team dinner. And that I care a great deal about, right? That's not a chore. That's something I want to go browse Instacart or paper cards.

in the store for, you know, two hours thinking about what we're going to eat. But I'd like to spend less time. I'd like to fully entrust an agent with the first task and spend more time, like, with the inspiration side. Or if you think about, like, let's say, you mentioned, you know, clothing, dressing my kids in general or just like it has to be functional and there's a base level of like enough socks and underwear of the same size. Like that should happen automatically, right?

Like, you know, there's enough data out there somewhere that says, like, these kids are this size and they continue growing and, like, please just keep me supplied. And then there's, you know, I want to wear matching outfits with my girls, you know, on Saturday. But I'm hoping for more of that division of labor over time. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think your examples are spot up. So one of the other things that I know you've been spending more time on recently is biotech and the neuroimmune space. you've started an organization called Metro Dora, which really helps accelerate research in a variety of areas. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? And then both what you're doing there

and how you're approaching it, then maybe we can touch a little bit upon how AI impacts that area as well. Absolutely. So about three years ago, I got diagnosed with a chronic illness. And it was interesting because I didn't know much about healthcare and biotech at the time. But clearly, I was very naive. I thought that there were, you know, wonderful research. in a lab trying to figure out a cure for my condition. And it turned out, like, you know, for that not to be the case. And I started discovering a lot of the issues with all health care and biotech industries. And so I decided to co-found Metro Dora with two amazing partners,

one's a doctor, one's a scientist. And the idea is really like blending clinical care and research so that we can accelerate discoveries in these conditions and really bringing the best technologies into the clinic as soon as possible because there is actually a 14 years delay between a new discovery, a new research discovery and that impacting the clinic, which is insane because when you're living with these conditions every day, when they're taking away so much of your joy and the types of things that you're able to do, telling yourself that there's like things out there that can help you, but it's going to take 14 years for them to be deployed in a clinic.

That's just absolutely maddening. And so our goal was like accelerate that translation and then also creates the research infrastructure by, you know, getting data on our patients to help biotech accelerate the path to a cure. And in particular, accelerate the translation into therapeutics and potentially improve the result that biotech gets from clinical trials. And so to your question, you add on like the role of AI, you know, I think if I look at the clinic, we're using AI in clinical genomics, we are using AI in pathology, we're using AI to like interrogate the immune system. Like all of these things are things where on the diagnostic side, like AI can do so much better than what a human can do because these are vast amounts of data

and therefore we think we're going to be able to detect things in ways that, you know, humans wouldn't have been able to do alone. And then on the kind of, you know, biotech and drug development side, it's also a really amazing age for that because I think that's going to massively accelerate the discovery of new compounds and also, like, actually improves the clinical trial results. So I'll tell you the thing that makes me incredibly mad when I hear, like, the AI Dumeers telling us about these very theoretical scenarios about, like, robots coming to kill us and the fact that we need to stop progress just in case the robots come, it's like, I'm like, there's no way

these people are living with, like, atrocious chronic illnesses, because when you're living with these every day and you see what AI can do, you're like, wait, like, the positive impact is, like, so obvious. It's like, it is going to happen. There's no way that the next five, years are not better than the previous five in terms of, like, actual discovery of cures, acceleration of research, all of these things. And so, like, blocking that progress for a theoretical, you know, arm, like, that seems crazy. Do we need to mitigate the arm? Absolutely. Do does technology do bad things? Absolutely. Always. But that's our job to maximize the good, minimize the bad, but not stop the good from happening because a lot of sick people are going

to rely on AI to get cured in the next 10 years. Yeah, it's interesting because we've talked quite a bit about this. And I should say that in the long run, I'm a dumer, but in the short run, I think, the impact of AI on global equity and health care and education and all these areas is so massively large that I think the calls to regulate are way premature, the calls to interfere in all sorts of ways that distort the market are way premature. And so it's a very, moment in time where for some reason, people have lost all the positives, and all they focus on is fear. And you're like, well, that's the wrong way to think about anything. You know, most telling is when they say it's just like nuclear. And you're like, well, you know, because of us regulating

nuclear, the new nuclear regulatory body, which was established in the 70s, prevented any new nuclear power plant design from being approved for 50 years. So is that really what we want? And so I just think there's a lot of naivety and sort of misconceptions in the industry right now around this stuff is kind of striking. What do you think is missing in terms of AI supporting biotech or supporting your efforts? I think people are already doing these things. I mean, you know, on the biotech side, recursion has been added for a while. On the healthcare side, we're starting to see some real progress. I think it's all about like adoption. Like on the healthcare side, I think it's all about adoption in the clinic and in the real workflows of doctors.

And so the technology is there. It's more about like how do you embed that into clinical workflows in a way that actually enhances what doctors are doing? Because, I mean, think about your doctors. Like, when do you think they have the time to keep up with the latest research? Like, they don't. Like, they are overwhelmed by, you know, administrative works. They're seeing patients all the time.

Like, most doctors do not read the latest research. that's something that can be solved through AI, like AI can do a great job summarizing the latest research that your doctor is actually current. But, you know, how do you integrate that so that doctor sees that as an enhancer to their knowledge and something that, you know, they can rely on to help? I think that's going to be critical. Obviously, accuracy is going to be, like, critical here. I think it's really important that we vet all of the sources that. that go into whatever AI engine powers doctors' decisions to say the least. But again, there's nothing new there.

I mean, doctors have used Google for a long time, and Google is not fully embedded. And so I think it's like, these are the types of problems we're going to have to solve, but they're not necessarily new problems. And then on the biotech side, I would say, you know, there is this promise that AI can find new compounds, that AI can accelerate clinical trials. and things like that. So reality is that we haven't seen that yet. You know,

like the best AI-driven companies in biotech have been added for a number of years. And there's a question on like, does this new trend fundamentally accelerate that? Does it take just more time because everything in biotech takes time? But I think in five years, we need to be able to look back and be like, oh, great, the number of AI-driven, you know,

drugs that have been put up the market has increased tremendously. by the way, that's already the case and happening, but not just that. They have actually made it through clinical trials with a higher success rate than the rest, and they are actually, when they get deployed, they end up helping people at a greater rate than the drugs that are currently deployed

that sometimes pass clinical trial, but help, you know, 20% of the intended audience. And so these are the proof points that I think we will need to see, and Rina is just too early to know if that's going to happen. Makes sense. Yeah. No, it's very exciting. You're working in this area as well. So thanks for contributions there. Thank you. Well, I have to credit you, Yelad, because when I started this journey in biotech, I asked Yerlad, like, hey, how do I get up to speed? And he gave me the best advice, which was to hire a Stanford grad to teach me biology and biotech. And that has allowed me to know a little bit about what I'm talking about. And so thank you for the tip, Yelad and the encouragement early on. Oh, sure. Now you'd probably just use chat at GBT, but you know, we did humans for that kind of stuff. Well, I guess as we wrap up, is there anything else that you were hoping we'd talk about

that we didn't touch on? No, I think we covered a lot of great topics, guys. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for the incredible conversation. Yeah, thanks for joining us, VG.