CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. A Brief History of AI in Healthcare w/ Lekan Wang, Partner, JSL Health Capital
Mar 20, 2026
Lekan Wang, Partner at JSL Health Capital and former Palantir data veteran, brings AI-first investing perspective. He traces AI's real milestones from data integration to transformers. Short takes cover where AI is already helping diagnosis, drug discovery, and clinical operations. He also explains why proprietary data and better digitization matter for scaling impact.
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Palantir Origin Story And Early Healthcare Work
- Lekan Wang joined Palantir after college and worked on healthcare data integration starting with CDC foodborne epidemiology.
- He described Palantir's origin in post‑9/11 intel data integration and early healthcare projects that bridged county/state data fragmentation.
DARPA And ImageNet Sparked Today's AI Breakthrough
- The modern AI era emerged after DARPA challenges and the rise of convolutional neural networks trained on ImageNet.
- These milestones plus larger datasets and compute enabled deep networks to handle real‑world tasks far beyond classical statistical ML.
The Three Pillars Powering Modern AI
- Three forces drive today's models: vastly larger datasets, much greater compute (GPUs/TPUs/ASICs), and the transformer architecture ('Attention is All You Need').
- The transformer made training at scale practical by changing how models process sequence data via attention and matrix operations.