AI ‘healthcare revolution’ already under way, Nvidia says

Taipei, Taiwan – Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has already brought about a “healthcare revolution” and is set to transform everything from pharmaceutical research to patient diagnostics and post-operative treatment, a top executive at chip giant Nvidia has said.

Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at Nvidia, said on Wednesday while it is still “early days”, healthcare will probably be more affected by AI than any other area of life.

“Healthcare is probably the most impactful utility of generative AI that there will be,” Powell said during Nvidia’s AI Summit, held on the sidelines of the Computex expo in Taipei.

Powell said AI is already making its mark in the field of developing and testing new drugs, which can take up to 15 years and cost up to $2bn under current timeframes.

“We care about fast and fast means in this industry, that we’ll be able to do more, and we know that drug discovery is essentially an infinite problem. You’re looking at a chemical space and 10 to the 60th power potential chemical compounds,” Powell said.

“This is essentially an infinite compute. Probably, the only way to intelligently search that space is through generative data.”

Powell said AI could be used for modelling to help researchers understand how the body might interact with new chemical compounds, which could help reduce the prevailing 90 percent failure rate of most drugs in clinical trials.

“With generative AI, we’re going to be able to not only generate more ideas and predict with better accuracy, but we’re also going to be able to model biology in new and exciting ways so that when we put a new chemical entity into the clinic, we have a higher success rate,” she said.

Read the full article here.