Issue #11
Funding Against the Tide | The Fall of Babylon Is a Warning for AI Unicorns | The Sanctions Age | + 4 Bonus Articles | Free Resources - Film AI
Venice the Piazzetta in the moonlight by Luigi Querena (1853)
Source: Artvee
Est. Reading Time: 5 mins
Science ⚛️
Funding Against the Tide
By Macroscience
Annotations
It is alarming and quite astonishing that many scientists and industry insiders considered mRNA vaccines, ex-ante, to be a dead-end for addressing the coronavirus pandemic. There was a significant gap between what was believed to be plausible in a field, and what was in reality possible. This poses an interesting question - under what circumstances is it justifiable to throw money at a solution even if it’s against expert consensus?
Multiple negative results in the initial phases of research can force researchers to prematurely wind up, considering it a dead-end even when additional investments would have led to a breakthrough. Ex: Neural networks which are considered cutting-edge now, were viewed as a stagnant and fundamentally limited method for achieving artificial intelligence after a flurry of activity in the 1960s.
Some of the reasons why researchers give up earlier than necessary include:
Existing solutions are profitable: For example, one of the reasons for the lack of interest in the mRNA vaccine project in its initial phases could be the high profitability of traditional vaccines and any new breakthroughs would’ve threatened that business. Similarly, impatient sponsors might force academic researchers to drop explorations earlier than they should.
Overemphasis on citations: In order to succeed in the research field, it’s important to publish in reputed journals and the more citations, the more recognition one receives. This has led researchers to focus on incremental studies rather than more risky and exploratory research which has higher chances of failure.
In summary, the frontier of the plausible has a tendency to be drawn more narrowly than is optimal.
There should be countercyclical funding for research on potentially revolutionary ideas. Science funding institutions should deploy their resources to encourage a final burst of effort exactly when expert consensus starts turning negative.
HealthTech 🩺
The Fall of Babylon Is a Warning for AI Unicorns
By the Wired
Annotations
Babylon is a London-based HealthTech startup founded in 2013 by British-Iranian ex-banker Ali Parsa. The ten-year-old startup had an ambitious goal, create an AI-powered symptom checker which can speed up—or even automate—diagnoses.
But behind the scenes, Babylon was not actually using AI but clinical flows/decision trees formulated by junior doctors at the company. They had divided the body up into different parts, and depending on which part of the body the user clicked on, the app would follow that specific clinical flow.
GP at Hand, Babylon’s symptom checker, was launched in 2017 to help tackle the NHS’s long waiting lists by automating some patient inquiries. In the same year, the startup claimed that its “AI” outperformed doctors on an exam used to test their ability to diagnose. The claim was quickly questioned by experts.
Despite making unfounded claims, Babylon was growing at a break-neck speed, picking up contracts with the NHS and British health insurance providers, signing deals with Tencent, and receiving investments from the likes of PIF- Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund (PIF invested $550M). By Jun 21, Babylon got listed on NYSE through the SPAC route valuing it at a whopping $4.2B.
But soon, the company started going downhill. Babylon witnessed mounting losses as it chased growth. In 2022, the company lost $221M and in the first three months of 2023, it lost $63M. Its share price tanked and soon the company shut down its operations in the UK and the US and filed for bankruptcy.
What went wrong?
According to ex-employees, the company went on an uncontrolled hiring spree, and teams were often working on overlapping projects.
The C-suite experienced a lot of churn and the senior leadership would secretly go on vacations to Antigua. Ali’s leadership style was alleged to be idiosyncratic and megalomaniacal.
Babylon’s ability to create a functional product did not match the overly ambitious claims made by Ali.
Currently, AI is not at a stage where it can replace human clinicians and any sort of tech disruption in healthcare should consider patient safety and outcomes.
There will be more meaningful healthtech innovation if startups start working more closely with clinicians from inception.
Geopolitics 🌏
The Sanctions Age
By the Phenomenal World
Annotations
In the last few decades, sanctions rose to prominence, reshaping the lives of millions around the world and redefining the relationships between nations. Sanctions have become one of the most prominent foreign policy tools in a country’s arsenal.
The country that has essentially weaponized sanctions is the US, leveraging the global dominance of the dollar to devise over seven sanctions programs targeting more than 9,000 entities.
However, the US seems to have overused sanctions which might be hurting its interests:
From the Siberian pipeline “debacle” of the 1980s to the withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018, the unilateral and extraterritorial use of sanctions by the US has jeopardized transatlantic relations.
The overuse of sanctions has forced targeted countries to not just circumvent them, but also find ways to permanently nullify them. Examples include China’s version of SWIFT, the CIPS, a financial messaging and clearing system that may lead to the formation of a fragmented global financial system in which some avenues are controlled by the US, while others escape its scrutiny. CIPS counts 1,200 financial institutions in one hundred countries as its users, which is around one-tenth of the number connected through SWIFT. Russia also has its own version of SWIFT, called SPFS.
In the past few years, China and Russia have accelerated their efforts to move away from trading in dollars, including through the adoption of digital currencies. By 2020, China settled more than 50% of its trade with Russia in a currency other than the dollar.
According to a study conducted by the Kiel Institute, “European countries bear a much higher cost of sanctions than the US, relative to their respective GDP values.” For example, in Germany, with losses equivalent to 0.2% of its GDP, sanctions were eighteen times more costly for Germany compared to the US.
Bonus 🎁
Hyperlocal weather forecasters are now influencers in India
A short and interesting read about the rise of hyper-local weather forecasters in India.
Facial Recognition Made Easy
An essential guide to track down key individuals for open source investigations.
In U.S.-China AI contest, the race is on to deploy killer robots
A very visually appealing and insightful article about the rise of weaponised AI robots.
The Concept That Explains Everything About Marketplaces
A must-read article covering everything you need to know about online marketplaces.
Free Resources 💡
Film AI: An interesting website where you can search for objects in films and TV shows. Courtesy:
For more free resources (180+ websites and tools), please check out Searching (it’s a Notion database that I’ve created).
Your breadth of coverage is immaculate! The annotation on mRNA vaccines and plausibility of technology was an important one. The Nobel prize given to scientists this year for their pioneering work on mRNA vaccine and its importance is more comprehensible when we read that annotation. Also, the bonus reads were really informative. Thank you for sharing!