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A key challenge in neurology is that brain data comes from deceased patients while trials use living ones. Verge Labs uses transformer AI to bridge this gap, inferring missing information and fusing disparate data sources (brain, blood, clinical records) into a unified "virtual biopsy."

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A significant part of Unlearn.ai's value is not just its advanced generative models, but its painstaking data harmonization work. The company builds internal machine learning tools to unify complex, disparate data sources like clinical trials and real-world data, which is the essential foundation for creating powerful models.

By using foundation models to analyze vast datasets, companies can create a synthetic 'standard of care' arm for single-arm Phase 1 trials. The AI matches patients based on deep clinical and genomic parameters, providing insights comparable to a much larger Phase 3 trial.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) companies have historically used proprietary formats to lock in customers. AI's ability to read and translate unstructured data from any source effectively breaks these data silos, finally making patient data truly portable.

We possess millions of data points on interventions, but they are useless to AI models because they're trapped in thousands of disparate EMRs in varied formats. The challenge is not generating more data, but solving the human incentive and alignment problems required to create unified data registries.

Unlike text-based LLMs where simply increasing parameter count works, Verge Labs found the biggest AI performance gains in biology come from scaling data modalities—adding new types of data like proteomics and imaging. Fusing different data sources is more critical than just making the model bigger.

By feeding an AI agent diverse personal data—diet logs, sleep tracking, bloodwork, and genetics—it can identify complex health issues that elude general advice. The AI can find "needle in the haystack" answers, like connecting restless leg syndrome to Swedish ancestry, offering hyper-personalized insights.

The value of a personal AI coach isn't just tracking workouts, but aggregating and interpreting disparate data types—from medical imaging and lab results to wearable data and nutrition plans—that human experts often struggle to connect.

Frontier AI models excel in medicine less because of their encyclopedic knowledge and more because of their ability to integrate huge amounts of context. They can synthesize a patient's entire medical history with the latest research—a task difficult for any single human. This highlights that the key to unlocking AI's value is feeding it comprehensive data, as context is the primary driver of superhuman performance.

OpenAI's move into healthcare is not just about applying LLMs to medicine. By acquiring Torch, it is tackling the core problem of fragmented health data. Torch was built as a "context engine" to unify scattered records, creating the comprehensive dataset needed for AI to provide meaningful health insights.

A neuroscientist-led startup is growing live neurons on electrodes not just for compute efficiency, but as a platform to discover novel algorithms. By studying how biological networks process information, they identify neuroscience principles that can be used as software plugins to improve current AI models and find successors to the transformer architecture.