Jakob Uszkoreit, after leaving Google, founded Inceptive to apply AI to drug development.

Jakob Uszkoreit, before co-founding biotech startup Inceptive, had an idea that would eventually make generative artificial intelligence possible. As a researcher at MIT in 2017, Uszkoreit was trying to speed up the training of neural networks.

The transformer, a neural network architecture that powers generative AI, was born from the suggestion to interpret data using self-attention.

"Google and other companies have been using transformers in production for years, but with less attention than OpenAI's ChatGPT, which was launched in late 2022."

The "Attention Is All You Need" paper, published by Uszkoreit and seven other Google researchers in 2017, introduced the transformer idea. However, all eight authors have since left Google.

"Google may not have been as daring as a smaller company like OpenAI when it comes to applying technology to different products, but this is something we should accept and be grateful for because Google provides something we all rely on daily."

In 2021, Uszkoreit left Google to co-found Inceptive, a biological software company. In September, Inceptive raised $100 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with the goal of using AI to accelerate drug development.

""RNA molecules, whose composition has been generated by artificial intelligence, exhibit behaviors native to specific biological systems, offering a promise of a medicine that is more in harmony with living systems than existing medicines," Uszkoreit stated."

Rewritten sentence: CNBC's Katie Tarasov interviewed Inceptive CEO Jakob Uszkoreit in a video.