Incentives, loss functions, and teaching models to explore

Of all the industries AI will transform, Kira Radinsky believes chemistry and biology will change the most. 

Kira is the co-founder and CTO of Diagnostic Robotics, which uses AI to automate the administrative work that's crushing healthcare teams — so clinicians can actually focus on patients. She's also the co-founder of Mana.bio, where they're accelerating drug discovery by orders of magnitude.

She'll tell you she's terrible in the lab. Not because she isn't brilliant, but because she can't pipette without killing the cells. So she’s thrilled that thanks to her skills in data and AI she was able to realize her childhood dream of being a scientist: 

But this episode is about more than healthcare. It's about how to build systems that get smarter over time — feedback loops, causal inference, incentivizing algorithms to take risks, and knowing when to optimize for ROI instead of accuracy. Lessons that apply whether you're building in biotech or not.

We cover:

• How growing up Jewish in Soviet Ukraine — and fleeing to Israel just before the Gulf War — shaped Kira's obsession with predicting the future
• How she built a system that successfully predicted real-world events, including Cuba's first cholera outbreak in Cuba in 130 years
• How Mana.bio is using AI to build "rocketships" that deliver drugs to the right cells — and how they've done in three months what used to take 20 years
• Why predictions are only valuable if there's something you can do about them — and why that makes healthcare an ideal field for AI 
• How to incentivize algorithms to make bolder predictions (it's easy to predict there won't be an earthquake today; it's much harder to say there will be)
• Why causal inference is the most underrated tool in machine learning right now
• How healthcare AI can perpetuate racial bias — and what builders need to do differently

Note: this interview originally aired in October 2024.

Chapters:

• (01:44) - Why predictions are so important to Kira: lessons from fleeing Soviet-era Kyiv
• (05:10) - Building a prediction engine from 150 years of news
• (08:35) - How Kira predicted the Cuba cholera outbreak
• (09:50) - Returning to biology by way of data
• (12:50) - Predicting healthcare outcomes by finding your patient's twin
• (17:53) - The racial bias hiding in healthcare AI
• (19:15) - Building Mana.bio and accelerating drug discovery
• (24:33) - "In three months, what did what used to take 20 years"
• (31:44) - Builder tips: ROI, causal inference, and teaching algorithms to explore
• (35:07) - Planning: Where generative AI needs improve

• Kira Radinsky on LinkedIn
• Diagnostic Robotics
• Mana.bio

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Music by Jonathan Zalben