Jim Breyer, welcome to Davos. So great to be with you here at another World Economic Forum. We're here at the Belvedere Hotel. We're about to launch into our event here and welcome speakers like Ray Dalio, yourself, others talking about the trends in AI and also in the economy. Jim, you've been following all these trends. You've been involved. You've been investing in dozens and dozens of companies, including our own. What do you see right now at the nexus of AI and healthcare? I know you and I share a passion for medical breakthroughs, diagnostic breakthroughs, treatment breakthroughs. Tell us what you're seeing at the nexus of AI and healthcare.
I will. But Jack, what a pleasure again to be with you here at the Belvedere. And as you recall and I recall well, our discussions around quantum, AI and SandboxAQ started right here, right here in Davos. Upstairs. So it's great to see you again. And of course, we talk every couple of days. So it's a genuine pleasure. I've been interested, as you know, as yourself, deepening my knowledge of AI since 2016 and 2017 when simultaneous dinners one week with Mark Zuckerberg and later with Sergey Brin where they each suggested to me, AI is a very big deal, Jim, you should delve in. And so that's what I've done. And around 2019, I started getting very interested in the academic papers around quantum. And I was also throwing myself into where AI and quantum algorithms could make a profound difference in healthcare.
So let's just highlight that, Jim, that AI and quantum, twin engines of compute independently very powerful, but also together interesting synergy. And now take us to healthcare. You've always had this passion for healthcare. Now talk about these twin engines and the healthcare interest.
Absolutely. Well, like many people, when I ask for a show of hands when I'm speaking, we've all been touched either by relatives who have been affected by cardiology treatments, cancer, the various levels of cancer, neurology, Alzheimer's, neurodegenerative. And so when I started speaking to the great medical leaders, a couple of them are prior portfolio companies, now Nobel Prize winning scientists. They talked about the need and the use to assist our very best researchers with AI and quantum. And so we never, ever will take out the genius neuroscientist at Mass General Brigham or Mayo Clinic, where I know we have a deep partnership, MD Anderson, Hopkins. But using AI and quantitative tools to better assist with great patient outcomes is exactly what our global medical leaders are now thinking about over the next five years. So we are just scratching the surface. And it's a tremendous time to be an entrepreneur, tremendous time to be an investor in these areas, but most importantly, a tremendous time looking forward to have the ability to not only have patients live longer lives, but better lives.
Yeah, yeah. And Jim actually agreed on that. Let's talk now about two different subtypes of AI. There's been a lot of focus and attention in the popular press, certainly about large language models, a lot of applications. Certainly every company out there that touches consumers needs to use large language models to cut their customer interface costs, be it customer service by phone to be done by AI via various channels, marketing and reducing costs. They're coding, you know, having the copilot with you to increase your coding productivity, all good applications of the language. When it comes to healthcare and medical breakthroughs, we both know that on the quantitative side, that really is the way that we're going to unlock these breakthroughs. Models trained on social media and captions is not necessarily going to get us that next treatment for Alzheimer's, for dementia, for cancer, as you talked about. So talk about your perspective on language models, but also large quantitative models trained on chemistry and biology.
Well, the future for science is the large quantitative models. I'm absolutely certain of that. And if we dial back to the mid-nineties when everyone was trying to figure out, let's have a web building proposition or even the number of search companies that existed in that time period, these are fundamentally important consumer technologies. But if we want to model small molecules, ChatGPT and all of its future variants, whether it's GPT-4 plus or five, are not equipped to help scientists evaluate how are small molecules going to be impacted in such a way from modeling so that we can leap forward and help patients at the end of the day really understand what's going on, whether it's cancer, whether it's cardiology, what is going on, and then how do we bring drugs to market, how do we do therapeutics and also diagnostics to help patients live longer and better. And we need very deep, large quantitative models to do those kinds of simulations.
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Breyer, J. (2025, February 3). How AI and quantum are transforming healthcare | Jack Hidary x Jim Breyer at Davos 2025 [Interview transcript]. SandboxAQ. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/548726/
MLA
Jim Breyer. "How AI and quantum are transforming healthcare | Jack Hidary x Jim Breyer at Davos 2025." SandboxAQ, 3 Feb. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/548726/.
BibTeX
@misc{breyer2025_548726,
author = {Jim Breyer},
title = {How AI and quantum are transforming healthcare | Jack Hidary x Jim Breyer at Davos 2025},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, SandboxAQ. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {feb},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/548726/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
