Co-founder at Relation (@relationrx) - applying #singlecell (check @scTrends_update !) #genomics #crispr #machinelearning to #drugdiscovery and #healthcare.
UK, Japan, sometimes USA
Joined October 2014
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Updated my substack. Expecting to post more in the next few months.
wildtypehuman.substack.com/w…
Sorry to say, but about 70% of universities need to be closed and/or reclassified as colleges.
(Confession of a former academic)
🚨🇬🇧 NEW: The UK Government has announced plans to withdraw funding from “poor quality degrees”
[@FT]
Jake P. Taylor-King retweeted
You wake up to a nightmare.
- You had £100k in an account but someone took £3500 from you and there’s nothing you can do. It will happen every year.
- someone has taken out £100k of debt in your families name. You’re on the hook for it. So are your kids. Every year the interest is due.
Both of these things are real. The UK has 3.5% inflation and £3T of debt (£100k per family).
New @RelationRx blog post: The case for better osteoporosis therapies
relationrx.substack.com/p/th…
One of the biggest challenges for biotech founders is setting up a business too early (myself included).
You don’t have the track record to hire good people.
Good people don’t want to work for a popular twitter handle.
Such a bloody obvious idea and a no brainer to implement in the UK
BREAKING: President Trump reveals his new anti-fraud program set up to reward people who expose fraud with a 1% commission on the money uncovered.
"If you turn somebody in and you, let's say report and you find $1 billion, we are giving a commission to that person of 1%."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
DOJ's published guidance caps individual whistleblower rewards at up to $30,000 per tip, not an uncapped 1% of fraud uncovered, with a total program fund of $25 million. A $1 billion fraud tip would not yield a $10 million payout under the official program rules. newsweek.com/trump-vance-of… foxnews.com/politics/trump…
So accurate. Governments pat themselves on the back for new elaborate regulation but don’t appreciate how creative people will get to avoid tax.
Solution: massively reduce regulation (and promote growth), whilst having very simple tax structures — that are unavoidable because there is no room for interpretation.
1. Kids set up a new company that becomes the marketing agency for the family business.
2. The marketing agency collects a fee that dramatically reduces the profit in the parents company.
3. The marketing agency acquires a minority stake with savage voting rights.
4. Independent valuation shows that this structure makes the business almost worthless.
5. The marketing company acquires the remaining shares.
Success in the UK is now 50% being excellent at what you do and 50% avoiding the governments latest scheme to derail the success and independence of your family.
Imagine if we can restore the reefs?! If you’ve seen the destruction, it’s so unbelievably sad.
This just made my weekend!
There's new hope for reversing widespread coral decline
go.nature.com/4yits7t
This would be hilarious, if not so sad.
Swiss bankers are a known fans of high income and capital gains taxes.
Jake P. Taylor-King retweeted
There's a story going around: after the drone strikes on Yandex data centres, comments on AfD and MAGA accounts collapsed.
We monitor 17,000+ politicians, media and civil society accounts in 30+ countries. 50,000+ posts a day.
So we checked.
We don't see it. 🧵
Jake P. Taylor-King retweeted
Michael I. Jordan, machine learning demigod, UC Berkeley
... the young people who work at these companies operate in a world [Silicon Valley, Berkeley, etc.] where these kinds of discussions are commonplace. Many of them aren’t really engineers; they come from the humanities, philosophy, or other disciplines. They’re 25 years old, they’re naive, they don’t do engineering work, they’ve never worked at large companies where real products are developed for real people, with discipline. And they get together, a bit like in Parisian cafés in the 1920s, to talk about these grand science-fiction ideas. When these young people resign, they know they’re going to attract attention. It allows them to feel virtuous and to be seen as very important figures. They claim to be giving up money, but in reality, they already have their stock options. So all of this is a grand moralizing performance that doesn’t serve the real objective it claims to pursue. There’s a great deal of naiveté here, which goes hand in hand with a certain cynicism…
di.ens.fr/~fbach/MJordan_ITW…
“ Would a mathematician bother spending 10 years to solve a problem if he/she knew that there is a machine out there that can solve it in three hours, but the owners of this machine are “kind” (or something like that) to not release the proof? “
Mathematicians are in shock because they realize that overnight, the way of conducting their profession is over and a replacement is not obvious.
They can embrace a new model, with AI driving proofs. But a serious issue is that different talents might be needed moving forward. The rare and celebrated gift of crafting mathematical proofs seems to have lost most of its value.
Being grumpy about OpenAI releasing these proofs is an immature first reaction. Would a mathematician bother spending 10 years to solve a problem if he/she knew that there is a machine out there that can solve it in three hours, but the owners of this machine are “kind” (or something like that) to not release the proof?
Jake P. Taylor-King retweeted
"Some DeepMind staff in the UK are subject to noncompete agreements that prevent them from working for a competitor for up to 12 months after they finish work at Google"
businessinsider.com/google-d…
Jake P. Taylor-King retweeted
This is exactly the right take from @wildtypehuman. Alas we can only dream that the Labour government will tie the removal of non competes to a broader package of pro growth labour market deregulation…
There’s two sides to a flourishing start up scene:
1. A lack of non-competes, and (controversially)
2. The ability to fire quickly!
I think @WorksInProgMag covered this at some point, but not being “locked in” to an underperforming employee means you can reallocate budget to someone new quickly.
A Labour government probably doesn’t want to do this second part, but the irony is: if you can fire easily, you can increase salaries because you can take more risk.
I think we need to agree a bargain: if you accept lower level of employment protection, some share of employment tax can be reallocated from the government to go to the employee directly.
Make it entirely optional, and say that once a company has 100 FTE they have to have at least 50% of employees on the full protection contract.
Jake P. Taylor-King retweeted
Mathematicians are OUTRAGED that their high social status, with its accompaniment of wealth, women, and general extravagance, has been encroached upon by artificial intelligences of humble background.
There’s two sides to a flourishing start up scene:
1. A lack of non-competes, and (controversially)
2. The ability to fire quickly!
I think @WorksInProgMag covered this at some point, but not being “locked in” to an underperforming employee means you can reallocate budget to someone new quickly.
A Labour government probably doesn’t want to do this second part, but the irony is: if you can fire easily, you can increase salaries because you can take more risk.
I think we need to agree a bargain: if you accept lower level of employment protection, some share of employment tax can be reallocated from the government to go to the employee directly.
Make it entirely optional, and say that once a company has 100 FTE they have to have at least 50% of employees on the full protection contract.
Isomorphic do not have any financiers that are traditional biotech venture funds.
Make of this what you will.
Isomorphic Labs, an AI-powered drug discovery startup spun out of Alphabet’s Google DeepMind, is in early talks to raise new funds at a valuation of at least $40 billion, according to people familiar with the effort. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Jake P. Taylor-King retweeted
The biggest unlock in Bio (aside from regs) would be the equivalent of an MIT license for core enabling technologies (e.g. CRISPR) along with more open standards/core reagents. Would mean researchers/companies could focus on new stuff, not the admin of getting to the frontier.
If I use AI to help write the code base, I don’t see an issue with AI being used to help write the Methods section.
However, having tried using AI to write a Results section… the output wasn’t great. It lacked a lot of context, didn’t know what to emphasise, tone was off etc.
Jake P. Taylor-King retweeted
Maybe some time in the future, we will have sentient AI with consciousness. But if some people and companies are seriously discussing this today, I think they really need to spend a bit more time outside their cult. Anthropic is really going down some strange paths.
NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.
Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s advisers “to take the possibility of model consciousness seriously.” Pope Leo XIV held firm.
For months, Anthropic has wined and dined theologians and religious scholars under nondisclosure agreements, hoping they would bless the idea that Claude has moral standing. thelettersfromleo.com/p/nyt-…
