Michael Acton Smith

I like making things: @Calm, #CalmBook, #SleepStories, @MindCandy, @MoshiMonsters, Perplex City, World of Warriors, Petlandia, @Firebox, PPFC and Berwickstock.

[Daniel Ek @eldsjal]

About to head into Neko launch week. Keeps reminding me of Spotify’s US launch 15 years ago. The product is different. The feeling in my stomach is not!

[Michael Acton Smith @acton]

Congrats Hjalmar and the @Neko team! 🚀

[Hjalmar Nilsonne @HjalmarNilsonne]

Today we're announcing that @Neko has raised a $700M Series C.

@eldsjal and I started the company with the belief that the solution to the trickiest problems in healthcare won't come from scaling the existing system.

Medicine has spent centuries getting good at treating disease. The next medical frontier will be understanding health and making sure things are not going wrong in the first place.

To proactively find problems you need to find when things start to change, and to do we need a completely new approach to tracking health over time. You cannot solve this by just adding more software to the existing system.

Diagnostic technology needs to become faster, cheaper and more accurate. Data needs to be understood continuously. Doctors need better tools and more time with each person.

That's why at Neko, we've rebuilt the entire stack: medical devices, sensors, AI, software, clinical protocols and clinics run by our own staff.

Our first product, the Neko Health Scan, maps millions of health data points and gives members their results in a single 60-minute visit. More than 100,000 people have now experienced it.

This new funding will help us advance the quality and affordability of preventive care by orders of magnitude.

We are expanding into the US, starting in New York City, and taking on some of the hardest problems in medicine: earlier detection, deeply personalized care, better health outcomes and new insights into the drivers of chronic disease.

Our goal is to make healthcare proactive by default. This funding will help get us there faster.

[Kirill Makharinsky @kirill]

I’ve never shared this publicly before, but here goes:

2.5 yrs ago, I was diagnosed with one of the most painful, life-changing diseases: rheumatoid arthritis

The surprising part?

I beat it and recovered only when I stopped following my doctors’ advice.

Here’s my story 👇

[Ben Blumenrose @benblumenrose]

Stripe Press sold 1000 books/day last year. That’s about $25k/day or over $9M/year off of 16 books! Incredible work and shows what you can do when high quality products meets distribution...

[Alex Tew @tewy]

Who's the best games industry recruiter in London?

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

Introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field. In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in <5 mins that would take a leading supercomputer over 10^25 years, far beyond the age of the universe(!).

[Michael Acton Smith @acton]

Big day at @Calm 💙

We’ve partnered with UnitedHealthcare (@UHC), the world’s largest healthcare company, to bring @Calm to 13 million of their members.

https://t.co/y0XK4BQoF4

[Michael Acton Smith @acton]

Fantastic news. Go @HarryStebbings!

https://t.co/k843iOaxN3

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

Winning the @NobelPrize is the honour of a lifetime and the realisation of a lifelong dream - it still hasn’t really sunk in yet.

With AlphaFold2 we cracked the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction: predicting the 3D structure of a protein purely from its amino acid sequence. Proteins are the building blocks of life, and knowing the structure of a protein is crucial for understanding the function it performs.

We then folded all 200 million proteins known to science and made those structures freely available for anyone in the world to use, with the help of our wonderful collaborators at @emblebi. Over 2 million researchers have already used AlphaFold2 and its predictions to advance a huge range of important work - everything from enzyme design, to disease understanding, to drug discovery.

But this is only the beginning. Over the next few years AI will help us make great strides towards developing new and more effective therapies for today's most prevalent diseases, and the fantastic team at @IsomorphicLabs are making rapid progress on this mission. I can’t think of a more important or beneficial use of AI.

Then of course there is advancing AGI itself, the original and enduring goal, and the vision behind the founding of DeepMind nearly 15 years ago. If AI is built safely and responsibly, I believe it will be one of the most transformative and beneficial technologies ever. I’ve always thought of AI as the ultimate tool to help us accelerate scientific discovery.

Congratulations to John Jumper (and David Baker!), the amazing AlphaFold team, and all our incredible colleagues at @GoogleDeepMind and @Google that supported and encouraged us along the way - this award is for all of us! It’s been such an honour and privilege to work with all of you to advance the frontiers of AI and science, and there is so much more to come!

[Nathan Benaich @nathanbenaich]

🪩The @stateofai 2024 has landed! 🪩

Our seventh installment is our biggest and most comprehensive yet, covering everything you *need* to know about research, industry, safety and politics.

As ever, here's my director’s cut (+ video tutorial!) 🧵

[Wellcome @wellcometrust]

We’re funding teams to develop scalable digital interventions to advance early intervention for anxiety, depression and psychosis.

💰 Level: £3-7 million
🗓 Deadline: 5 December

@elenanetsi from our Mental Health team tells us more 📹

[Michael Acton Smith @acton]

From ‘The Late Show’ with Stephen Colbert 🤣

Calm App: Donald Trump Edition https://t.co/BFJ9AvrdGK

[Ben Lang @benln]

Paul Graham on how to raise money:

[Daniel Ek @eldsjal]

Neko Health London is officially open for business. Incredible to reflect on how far we've come, considering the idea almost didn't happen. Back in 2018 I reached out to @HNilsonne , who wasn't exactly eager to dive into healthcare 🤣 fortunately, he eventually changed his mind and @neko was born with our vision to help people stay healthy through preventative measures and early detection.

Starting today, you can sign up on our website to get a scan at our new location in Marylebone. Can't wait to hear what you think! https://t.co/CLahjWxKEo

[Alex Tew @tewy]

made my first replit + claude app

come make some ripples!

https://t.co/OQngb70Jri

[Steven Bartlett @StevenBartlett]

This is one of the most honest, informative and revealing conversations I’ve ever had on The Diary of A CEO

Today, I’m joined by the incredible @hubermanlab 💥

[Michael Acton Smith @acton]

Go Kirill and team @enkidevs 💥

[Kirill Makharinsky @kirill]

Learning to code just became 10x easier!

@enkidevs just launched an AI coding coach experience that just… works.

Think “Superhuman for learning to code” 🧵

https://t.co/Ogkd6iFXWL

[Feeling Distant @annkpowers]

Even Calm is freaked out

[australian kitsch 🦘 @OzKitsch]

Canva: We came up with the worst corporate rap song ever
Compass Group: Hold my beer

[Michael Acton Smith @acton]

@jamiesmart Nice one Jamie! 💥