Truly wild story ๐คฏ. A new era of "citizen science" is beginning.
An engineer with no medical training used ChatGPT and Googleโs Alphafold (AI protein sequencer) to build a working cancer vaccine from scratch.
He turned raw genetic data into a custom mRNA vaccine that shrank his dying dog's tumor by 50%.
Paul Conyngham spent $3000 to get the DNA sequences of his dog's healthy blood and the cancerous tumor.
He was staring at gigabytes of raw genetic code without having any clue how to read biological data.
This is exactly where ChatGPT became the crucial missing link in his process.
He used ChatGPT as a high-level biological consultant to figure out how to compare the two DNA samples and spot the exact mutations causing the cancer.
ChatGPT gave him the step-by-step instructions to run the data pipelines and pointed him toward an AI tool called AlphaFold to map the physical shape of the damaged proteins.
The chatbot basically translated complex oncology concepts so he could write a half-page chemical recipe for an mRNA vaccine.
This mRNA is just a genetic instruction manual that tells the immune system how to recognize and attack those specific mutated cancer cells.
University researchers were blown away by his formula and manufactured the physical vaccine for him.
A veterinary expert then injected the dog, and within weeks the massive tumor had halved in size.
My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers.
App functionality will be added to the foundational models' offerings, because the big players aren't slow incumbents (it is wrong to apply the analogy of "fast startup, slow incumbent" here), they are just big. Far more so than with any other prior new technology, there is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsoletes every new app almost as fast as it can be invented. There is almost no time to build a company and scale it.
There are two ways AI application startup founders can make money:
- Make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash (my estimate is that you have about 12-18 months cashflow generation)
- Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity
The situation is highly unstable - we don't know if it's going to crash or go to the moon but both scenarios make it very unlikely that any AI application startup will independently become a generational supercompany (baseline odds are low to begin with).
The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones relating to real atoms (hardware or world-related) data and not software/finance.
This church has been under construction for 124 years. In 2026, it will become the tallest in the world.
It isn't funded by the state or even the Church โ it's being built entirely by the people.
And it's far more impressive than you realize... (thread) ๐งต
Reading a tweet is a bit like downloading an (attacker-controlled) executable that you instantly run on your brain. Each one elicits emotions, suggests knowledge, nudges world-view.
In the future it might feel surprising that we allowed direct, untrusted information to brain.
Life comes with a great game pre-installed.
Itโs called Walking.
All you have to do to start is go for a walk outside.
Then itโs somewhat random, but every few thousand steps or so you will find yourself reliably rewarded with a great idea.
Itโs free to play, forever.
@0FJAKE