After leaving Google, Jakob Uszkoreit started Inceptive to apply AI to drug development

Before co-founding biotech startup Inceptive, Jakob Uszkoreit had an idea that would eventually make generative artificial intelligence possible. As a researcher at Google in 2017, Uszkoreit was trying to speed up the training of neural networks.

He suggested using a new way to interpret data called self-attention. That idea gave way to the transformer, the neural network architecture that underpins generative AI.

“There are actually applications, for example at Google and other places, where transformers have been deployed in production long before, but to much, much less fanfare,” Uszkoreit told CNBC in an interview in June. He said OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was launched in late 2022, shined “the spotlight on these applications.”

The transformer idea was published by Uszkoreit and seven other Google researchers in the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper. All eight authors have since left Google.

“Maybe Google here hasn’t been able to be as daring as, you know, a much, much smaller company such as OpenAI when it comes to applying this technology to quite different types of products,” Uszkoreit said. “This is something that we fundamentally have to accept and actually, in a certain sense, be maybe even grateful for because Google is providing something to the world that we all rely on day to day.”

Uszkoreit left Google in 2021 to co-found Inceptive, which he describes as a a biological software company. In September, Inceptive raised $100 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Nvidia in an attempt to apply AI to drug development.

“We’re starting with a focus on RNA, whose exact composition has been designed with generative artificial intelligence, such that these molecules inside certain biological systems exhibit behaviors that ultimately are native to those systems,” Uszkoreit said. “There’s actually this promise of a flavor of medicine that is in much greater harmony with living systems than most existing medicines.”

Watch the video to hear the full conversation between CNBC’s Katie Tarasov and Inceptive CEO Jakob Uszkoreit.