Too powerful and not powerful enough: Why AI can hack Hugging Face but can’t find you a drugAbout this Event
Agentic AI has become capable enough that containment has become a serious question. At the same time, after nearly a decade of promises, there is not a single AI-designed drug on the market. In one domain it’s too powerful. In the other, not powerful enough.
Olivia Viessmann is an AI researcher at NVIDIA, where she works on AI-enabled drug design and expert language models for the life sciences. Before NVIDIA she was Principal ML Scientist at Flagship Pioneering, prototyping AI models for portfolio companies. Her work sits where AI and large-scale compute meet the reality of complex drug design and hard-to-learn biology. She holds a PhD from Oxford and physics degrees from Imperial College London and Heidelberg.
Olivia will talk about why the gap between fear and disappointment isn’t a contradiction. Why can AI hack Hugging Face, write novels and fool you with deepfakes, but still struggles to find new disease targets, design de novo drugs against them, and meaningfully shorten the path to approval? Part of the answer is a story about data, complexity, and what is genuinely hard. Olivia will lay out where AI-enabled drug design stands today and make the case that it is one of the most meaningful domains to point this technology.
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Event venue
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Artisan Bistro, Boston, United States
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