- This CRISPR company is leveling up…
- Another example of why we need ethics in AI…
- Google’s announcement isn’t what it seems…
Dear Reader,
Before we get to our insights today, I want to remind you that we are one week out from our Timed Stocks: Final Countdown event. It’s taking place next Thursday, March 18, at 8 p.m. ET.
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Now let’s turn to today’s insights…
An early stage company is using CRISPR to treat cancer…
A very large private funding round just caught my eye. Caribou Biosciences, an early stage company developing CRISPR-based therapies for cancer, just raised $115 million in a Series C venture round.
Caribou is a company I have been tracking for years. That’s largely because it was cofounded by Jennifer Doudna. If we remember, Doudna was one of two scientists who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last October for her research on CRISPR technology.
And what I love about Caribou is that it is taking on much more challenging problems than the early companies working on CRISPR-based therapies.
The first-generation CRISPR companies have been focused on diseases caused by a single genetic mutation. They use CRISPR to simply correct that one mutation, thus curing the disease. It’s a simplification, but I think of these diseases as the “low-hanging fruit.”
That’s not meant to be a knock on their work. It’s very smart for the first CRISPR companies to tackle diseases that are well understood and caused by a single mutation. They are easier to fix. And the industry needs some early victories to generate even more excitement and investment into genetic editing companies.
That said, CRISPR technology has advanced tremendously over the last three years. And it’s gotten to the point where Caribou is using it to develop CAR T therapies for cancer.
These therapies are much more complex, and nobody working in the CAR T space has really cracked the code yet. Early CAR T therapies demonstrated some limited efficacy without any major breakthroughs.
So these are big undertakings.
Caribou’s lead therapy targets non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It recently advanced into Phase 1 clinical trials. And the company’s second therapy, which is progressing toward preclinical trials, targets multiple myeloma.
Caribou is developing these therapies for patients who have undergone traditional cancer treatments without much success. The company’s goal is to cure cancer for these patients using next-generation CRISPR technology. It’s a great story and an exciting venture.
What’s more, pharmaceutical giant AbbVie just engaged in a partnership with Caribou. Per the deal, AbbVie will pay Caribou $40 million upfront to use its CRISPR genetic editing and cell therapy technologies.
And AbbVie has committed to paying up to $300 million in future milestone payments as the therapies it develops using Caribou’s technology progress.
This is very bullish for Caribou. And the big payday will help power Caribou’s lead therapy through the clinical trial process.
So this is absolutely a company to watch. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Caribou go public within the next 12–18 months.
Once it does, the company will make a fantastic investment target at the right valuation.
Facebook just turned its AI loose on Instagram without supervision…
Facebook just announced that it has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) system called the SEER. That’s quite an ominous sounding name if you ask me, especially if we understand what it does.
Most AIs today can only learn with human supervision. They must be “fed” large, structured datasets. And programmers basically use guardrails and provide guidance to prevent the AI from going too far off course.
Not the SEER.
This AI operates under what’s called a self-supervised learning model. There are no guardrails in place at all.
And Facebook just turned the SEER loose on one billion public Instagram images. These were random pictures that Instagram users have uploaded. None of them were labeled or curated. The goal was to see if the AI could accurately label and classify the images.
And sure enough, the SEER outperformed all other AI models with an 84.2% classification accuracy score. This is a common industry test when it comes to identifying images and objects. In comparison, the best supervised AI systems can only get up to about 80% classification accuracy.
This is a major breakthrough in the field of AI.
Self-supervised AI models have largely been an aspiration in the industry for decades. The idea is that if the AIs can learn on their own and govern themselves, they will be far more efficient. And they will potentially solve problems in novel ways that humans wouldn’t think of. This is a great goal if used for good.
But let’s stop for a minute here and ask a question.
Did Facebook get permission from the hundreds of millions of people who posted their photographs to help train its AI and ultimately profit? Did Facebook even notify them that this was happening?
Of course not. Buried in the Instagram user agreement somewhere is a clause that says Facebook can do pretty much whatever it wants with the content that users upload.
It’s not too hard to see how there’s massive room for abuse here.
The idea that companies like Facebook – which has proven itself to be a poor steward of customer data – can unleash self-supervised AIs on our data and photographs is very frightening. This could take the already troubling data surveillance practices to a whole new level.
Imagine an AI mining every photo anyone has ever posted of us on a social media platform, using facial recognition, and generating insights into our behavior. It could even be a photo someone took 10 years ago that we have long forgotten about.
It’s not too hard to see how this could get out of hand very quickly.
And now that Facebook has cracked the code, we will see other companies mirror this model of artificial intelligence to launch their own self-supervised AIs. Hopefully, they’ll do this for benevolent purposes.
The good news is that this kind of approach to AI can be used to solve very complex problems, not just to sell more advertising by surveilling consumer data.
As I have said before, the ethical framework around how AI technology is used will be one of the most important discussions this decade. And this is a great example of why it’s essential to address the increasing role AI will play in our lives.
Google says it is curtailing its data surveillance practices…
On a similar note, Google announced that it will get stricter with the use of software “cookies” that allow third parties to track consumer activity on its smartphones and web browsers. On the surface, Google appears to be following Apple’s lead here.
Many people likely still don’t know this, but Google monitors everything we do on the web and on our smartphones. And Google installs software cookies that allow other companies to track our activity as well.
Even iPhone users who have a Google app installed are not immune from Google’s all-seeing eye. The company has some extremely popular applications like Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Waze, and YouTube. So most consumers have already fallen into Google’s surveillance net.
Because of this, Google now has more than a decade-long dossier on nearly all of us. And this doesn’t just include our online activity – it includes anything we do on our phones and anywhere we have traveled.
Since most of us carry our smartphones with us everywhere, Google knows exactly where we have been at all times for more than 10 years now. That’s another scary thought.
However, Google will start phasing out those cookies that allow third-party companies to track us. Google is also going to crack down on app developers that bury tracking software in the applications they provide through the Google Play store.
This is going to devastate a lot of app-development companies. It’s a good bet that nearly all “free” apps available for download have tracking software in them. That’s how the app developer makes its money – by selling our data to advertisers.
So Google is positioning this announcement as if it is doing something virtuous and standing up for the little guy. I’m sure the company hopes that consumers will view it in the same light as Apple when it comes to privacy issues.
But the announcement is not what it seems.
Nothing at all will change with Google’s business. It will continue to track us every second of every day using “cohorts” instead of cookies. What this means is we’ll be assigned numbers that represent our interests. Similar numbers will be grouped together, so we’ll see ads targeted at our cohort rather than us specifically.
But advertisers are likely to want small, personalized cohorts to increase the accuracy of their targeting. And guess what? The smaller the cohort, the easier it becomes to spot individuals within them. As such, the “improvement” to our privacy is very suspect…
And we should remember that Google already has a complete dossier on each and every one of us from all past web activity.
All this change will really do is hurt app developers and other companies that generate revenue by tracking us through Google’s cookies. In other words, Google is putting the competition at a severe disadvantage and further strengthening its dominant position in digital advertising.
This is a massive powerplay that will only make Google even stronger.
So my suggestion remains the same – use alternatives to Google’s products wherever possible.
Switch from Gmail to another email provider. Use Brave or Firefox web browsers instead of Google Chrome. Use Apple Maps instead of Google Maps or Waze. Use Vimeo instead of YouTube.
And dump any Android-based smartphone for an iPhone. Unlike Google, Apple doesn’t sell access to customer data. It does not surveil us for profit.
Regards,
Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge
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