Serim Tarcan

Poet Emily Dickinson on the value of small actions:

"If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain."

Source: "If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking"

A look back at AlphaGo—the first AI system that beat the world champions at the game of Go, decades before it was thought possible—is useful here as well.

• In step 1, AlphaGo was trained by imitation learning on expert human Go games. This gave it a foundation.


• In step 2, AlphaGo played millions of games against itself. This let it become superhuman

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A framework for evaluating opportunities in digital health

Here are some of the diligence questions I have collected over the years, that I share with my students. They are broken down into categories of risk: Market, Execution, and Product. 

Market risk

At a high-level, does this address a real problem in healthcare (cost, quality, access)

Is there a... See more

In addition to insider bullishness, I think there’s a strong intuitive case for why it should be possible to find ways to train models with much better sample efficiency (algorithmic improvements that let them learn more from limited data). Consider how you or I would learn from a really dense math textbook:

• What a modern LLM does during training

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the hope lies with the Arctic’s “green” minerals, which global warming is making more accessible. They include cobalt, graphite, lithium and nickel, important ingredients in electric-car batteries; zinc, used in solar panels and wind turbines; copper, required for all sorts of things electric; and rare earths, crucial to many types of green and... See more

Only about 30% of API manufacturing facilities that supply ingredients for drugs for the US market are themselves based in the US. The rest are spread across places like India, China, and the EU

paradox with generic injectables in particular: an intensive manufacturing process with very low profit margins.

There’s a famous WWI poem about how one generation sacrifices for another, hopes that they can carry the work onwards. “To you from failing hands we throw,” it reads, “The torch; be yours to hold it high.”

According to data gathered by Jason Miller, a professor at Michigan State University who specializes in supply-chain management, China produces more than 70 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, air conditioners, and cookware; more than 80 percent of the world’s smartphones, kitchen appliances, and toys; and about 90 percent of the world’s... See more