Britain ‘becoming incubator nation’ of firms that flee London bit.ly/4ySMiDl

🚨 NEW: The IFS says John Healey faces a £35bn black hole in his first Budget

Isomorphic Labs, an AI-powered drug discovery startup spun out of Alphabet’s Google DeepMind, is in early talks to raise new funds at a valuation of at least $40 billion, according to people familiar with the effort. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

There’s two sides to a flourishing start up scene: 1. A lack of non-competes, and (controversially) 2. The ability to fire quickly! I think @WorksInProgMag covered this at some point, but not being “locked in” to an underperforming employee means you can reallocate budget to someone new quickly. A Labour government probably doesn’t want to do this second part, but the irony is: if you can fire easily, you can increase salaries because you can take more risk. I think we need to agree a bargain: if you accept lower level of employment protection, some share of employment tax can be reallocated from the government to go to the employee directly. Make it entirely optional, and say that once a company has 100 FTE they have to have at least 50% of employees on the full protection contract.

A universal predictive model of the cell would dramatically accelerate science, allowing biologists to perform experiments digitally. Today we’re announcing a major partnership with the DOE and NIH. The goal of this partnership is to generate the data that will be needed to build an accurate model of the cell with artificial intelligence. Isomorphic, Google DeepMind, and Meta are joining us as founding partners in the Virtual Biology Initiative. This is the beginning of a large scale coordinated effort to map cellular biology to power the development of digital models of life. Other leading scientific institutions and consortia including the Allen Institute, Broad Institute, Gladstone Institutes, the Human Cell Atlas, the Human Protein Atlas, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, as well as NVIDIA, are working together as part of this international scientific project. Creating a predictive model of the cell is one of the most important challenges for the next decade of science. The insights that come from this could unlock a far greater understanding of disease, and open new paths for cures. We invite the worldwide scientific community and other funders to join us in this effort.

Eli Lilly CEO sharing the actual pronunciation of Retatrutide…😳 Half of the internet has been saying it wrong

We created gyms because modern day work no longer required physical activity. Without exercise, our muscles atrophy. I predict we’ll need gyms for our brains too, once AI starts doing our knowledge work.

Also worth pointing out: > France has solid LLM capabilities (@MistralAI) > Germany has just entered the race (@Aleph__Alpha) > Italy is building @domynai > The UK has @CosineAI which is building a sovereign LLM It may have taken a few years but it does look like Europe is genuinely entering the AI race. There is a very real chance that Europe could come out on top in open-source models. Or, at the very least, have its own sovereign capabilities to use locally. 12 months ago this was unimaginable. NICE

The case for giving everyone GLPs…

This is sensible. Our tax and benefit system creates a massive cliff-edge at £100,000. People who could be earning more (and therefore paying more tax) are incentivised to refuse work and overpay into their pensions. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmn0…

A 15 fold rise in GLP 1 prescribing without an apparent FDA approved indication is concerning. With 35% of recipients at a normal BMI, it is surprising that so many clinicians are willing to prescribe without established evidence of benefit and safety in this population. @DrHLofton onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…

Myostatin inhibitors and the paradox of larger but weaker muscles peterattiamd.com/myostatin-i…