Monday: Two Change Makers

Good morning Change Makers,

It has been an auspicious week. The worlds of science and creativity have changed and today we are reporting from the front lines. 

If you want to learning about future of drug discovery and music, then read on.

Jack

In March 2020, the world recoiled into lockdowns as the first global pandemic in 100 years swept across the world. We were told initially it could take years to develop a vaccine. 

Vaccines typically take 5-10 years to develop, trial, and safely deploy. To create a vaccine scientists develop a neutered version of the virus that our body can then make antibodies for. Antibodies are our body's way of fighting viruses. 

Through Operation Warp Speed we were able to shrink vaccine development from 10 years to 12 months and save millions of lives. 

Imagine if we were able to do that for all drugs. Not just vaccines but every drug that could possibly be developed

This week, Google released Alpha Fold 3, enabling us to take a big step towards this goal. 

A new era of biology

Last week, I wrote about a company called Profluent which uses AI to improve gene therapy. In that piece, I said, proteins are the building blocks of all biological life. 

Imagine you have a box with 1000’s of Lego pieces in it. How many different structures could you build with those pieces? Millions right? 

If I released an AI model that gave you all of the possible structures you could build and how to build them, you would be able to build it much faster. 

That is what Alphafold 3 does, it has started an era of biological warp speed by giving scientists the tools to make the drugs and treatments the world needs.

Protein structures govern how different proteins interact with each other. They are like puzzle pieces, with some fitting together and others not. AlphaFold 3 also shows scientists how these proteins interact with each other. 

Before AlphaFold, scientists made a lot of very educated guesses about protein structures and their interactions. AlphaFold 3 brings forward a future where the number of guesses is reduced and the exact way of modelling all biological systems is enabled.

More info:

1. Watch Demis Hassabis (CEO of Google Deepmind) explain the impact of AlphaFold

   Thanks to AI, new medical breakthroughs may one day move from years to mere months.

   Listen to @GoogleDeepMind CEO @demishassabis’ full conversation with @TEDchris on how this tech is helping us solve some of science’s biggest mysteries: t.ted.com/sRLw3lQ

   — TED Talks (@TEDTalks)
   8:27 PM • May 2, 2024

2. You can read more about AlphaFold 3 here

   AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules

   Our new AI model AlphaFold 3 can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy.

   blog.google/technology/ai/google-deepmind-isomorphic-alphafold-3-ai-model

   

Being an artist just got easier

In the 15th century, a young man apprenticed with one of the great painters of Italy, a man named Domenico Ghirlandaio. This young painter and sculptor was a genius in his own right and created some of the world’s most revered works of art. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, sculpted David, and the Creation of Adam. A change maker in every sense of the term. 

The ability to create art was gated for a select few. You had to apprentice with one of the great artists and then hope to be given the opportunity to create your own work. 

600 years on from Michelangelo’s masterpieces creating art, music, films, and movies has never been easier. Cameras are in all of our pockets, you can learn the guitar from YouTube and create and sell digital images using AI. 

The difficulty in creating works of art asymptotes over time. That is to say that, technology allows more and more people to create things, whether that is music, art or films. Creative expression gets easier.

This week it got much easier for the world of music as ElevenLabs released their first-ever music AI model.

The future of music

To be a musician, like Michael Angelo, you previously had to learn instruments from a teacher or be self-taught, but at least have your own personal skill. ElevenLabs released an AI model this week that allows you to create entire songs using a prompt. 

This has unlocked a whole new of people to make music. I think the world is a better place the more freedom individuals have to creatively express themselves. 

One take I heard this week about this release was that people can create their own perfect song. This will democratise music so much that consumers of music won’t wait to hear a song they like but just create it themselves using a prompt.

I think this is unlikely. People don’t have the time or energy to create their own perfect music. Prompts to an AI model are an imperfect way of getting the product you want. These models do not currently have a way of iterating on outputs.

You can’t say for example “Keep everything about this track, but add some more vocals to the second verse”. The model will just generate a completely new track. 

I also don’t think it will massively change the music industry. Music’s bottleneck is not a shortage of incredibly talented artists, but a few gatekeepers at the top of the industry that pick the winners. 

Whilst companies like Spotify have given the long tail of musicians more access to an audience than ever before, the music industry is still controlled by the major record labels. I think this will continue to change over time but I don’t think you are going to have an AI musician start beating Taylor Swift through prompts any time soon. 

With that said, ElevenLabs has changed the game of music creation. This will be a new tool in the arsenal of creatives and the world will be a more beautiful place because of it. 

More reading: