“Humanity has a great task: to build technologies that have positive value. I dream that artificial intelligence can reduce human suffering.”
He created the first “ChatGPT” type system for biomedical sciences in New York capable of giving correct and complete answers to thousands of scientific questions. It is a research platform, trained with dozens of artificial intelligence models, which gives access to a huge amount of biomedical information. There is more: helps uncover hidden relationships between genes, diseases, drugs, people and technologies. Dozens of global institutions, pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies and research institutes are already using it.
He is Stefano Pacificojust over 40 years old, together with David Heeger, esteemed professor of neuroscience at New York University and member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, has founded Epistemic AI. An entrepreneurial adventure that quickly also became a mission: to accelerate biomedical research and the development of therapies to reduce suffering. First of all: that of her child, who suffered from a rare form of cancer.
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If you know the story of Pacifico, you realize how many things in our lives are already written and how, looking back, we can connect the dots so loved by Steve Jobs.
Born and raised in Rome, the family environment in which he grows up is the forensic world. Dad judge, grandfather judge. Nothing suggests that he would become an entrepreneur. Stefano graduated in computer engineering at La Sapienza. A scholarship for a Masters in Computer Science at Columbia University in New York completely changes the course of his life. “It was my first transoceanic trip. I thought: I’ll stay for a year, then I’ll come back.” 17 years have passed and it’s still there.
His first research experience in the field of artificial intelligence dates back to 2003, which also continued during his master’s degree. His first job is at Bloomberg LP, one of the most established financial information and analysis companies in the world, where he will also work as an AI researcher. “I was fascinated by the possibility of uniting the world of finance with that of technology“. In those years he developed algorithms that had to do with the use of information. “When faced with a large number of sources of information, a person has two problems: comparing the information between one source and another, and knowing that the sources themselves exist! One does not know what one does not know, that is, that there is other”.
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In those years Pacifico discovered the value of doing business. “Enterprise understood as the individual’s ability to go from zero to one, from nothing to something, is a lesson I learned in America.” He founded a startup in the field of artificial intelligence applied to financial news. Then he meets an American girl. He falls in love, gets married. His first child is born. At a certain point super scientist David Ferrucci, the man who created IBM Watson, calls it (named after Sherlock Holmes’ assistant), an artificial intelligence system capable of answering questions expressed in natural language. Together with Ferrucci he began working for the Bridgewater Associates fund and collaborated with him on Elemental Cognition, an AI company, born as a spin-off of the fund. In that period he met the person who would become his co-founder, neuroscience professor David Heeger.
“With David I discovered that even in the biomedical field there were thousands of sources of information, most of which were completely disconnected from each other and unknown to most“.
The theme of information recurs. And this time he combines a passion for biomedicine that has always been there in him. “I have always orbited intellectually around this area.”
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Already at 10 years old he began to wonder why. “At that age I lost my mother to cancer. Many years later I founded a small non-profit to combine doctors and artificial intelligence. When I met David I understood that there could be an opportunity. To follow this idea I resigned, and together we founded Epistemic AI in 2018: I remained without a salary for more than a year. I wanted to understand if we could actually build a business. In 2019 with the first funds we began to build the first prototypes of Epistemic AI. With a team of extraordinary scientists and engineers, today we work with pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, research hospitals, cancer centers, precision medicine companies and sometimes directly with patients. help those who are lost in the traffic of biomedical information to take a step forward.”
In 2020, one event after another push Pacifico to believe it even more. The father dies of cancer. After two months, Covid broke out (“which made us understand the importance of accelerating access to data and information”.) A few months later, her second child, only one year old, was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer.
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“At that time we were a small group of people starting to build technology. But as a father, there was only one question: Does it make sense to continue building a startup at this time? Access to the healthcare system in the United States, Even from a financial point of view, it’s not that simple and startups don’t offer stable employment. The answer I gave myself? The only way I can influence my son’s future is to accelerate biomedical research and the discovery of therapies. And this pushed me to continue with our project and give 100%.
The therapy chosen for my son was also influenced by the research I myself did on our platform. Now we don’t know what lies ahead for him, but thank the Universe, three years after a 12-month course of chemo, there is no evidence of disease in him today.”
How does Epistemic AI work?
“It’s an interactive platform based on a network of knowledge composed of more than 6 billion concepts and 20 billion connections. This set of knowledge was obtained from hundreds of sources of primary information, which we ingested and through machine learning and artificial intelligence we broke up and recomposed within our system, in order to make them more easily accessible and usable. To build such a complex architecture we trained dozens of artificial intelligence models, including Epistemic GPT.”
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“We are at the beginning of a new industrial revolution, that of AI. It’s time to make applications that go well beyond shopping and social media concrete. Our dream is to democratize access to this technology, to make it available to small and large pharmaceutical companies. More artificial intelligence, more technology, more information, more drugs created quickly, more competition, lower prices. Less suffering.”
Will you return to Italy?
“L‘Italia it’s my country, where my family is, my loved ones, all my memories. He gave me a great opportunity: to come to the United States. And I’m trying in every way to find a way to share my experience with Italy. I don’t know if life will bring me back but we are planning a center of excellence for artificial intelligence right in the Central South. A center of gravity for numerous talented engineers.”
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Errors?
“Many, all the time. When you hire people, when you take a direction, when you convince yourself that you are doing something right and instead it is wrong. Starting a startup is much more difficult than anyone might think. There are so many unknowns. “It’s a manual that you can follow. There are technological complexities, human complexities, market complexities. You have to believe in it, try to silence the no’s, which you will hear much more often than the yes’s, without falling prey to your presumption. But the efforts you make they have an ultimate goal: to bring positive value to society.
I think humanity can progress, thanks to technological development. Every day we get up, we who work with technology have the opportunity to create value. We have the opportunity to focus our energies on creating technologies that have virtuous applications.
Of course there are rules, we should also invest more in the humanities to understand what the impact of these technologies is, how we should live our lives, what are the principles around which we should organize our society. And based on these then determine which uses are permitted and which are not. Technology is progress. And you just need to look at history, the past, to notice that progress has always decreased suffering“.
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