[brandonb]

LeCun's technical approach with AMI will likely be based on JEPA, which is also a very different approach than most US-based or Chinese AI labs are taking.

If you're looking to learn about JEPA, LeCun's vision document "A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence" is long but sketches out a very comprehensive vision of AI research: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf

Training JEPA models within reach, even for startups. For example, we're a 3-person startup who trained a health timeseries JEPA. There are JEPA models for computer vision and (even) for LLMs.

You don't need a $1B seed round to do interesting things here. We need more interesting, orthogonal ideas in AI. So I think it's good we're going to have a heavyweight lab in Europe alongside the US and China.

[sanderjd]

Have you published anything about your health time series model? Sounds interesting!

[brandonb]

Sure! Here’s a description: https://www.empirical.health/blog/wearable-foundation-model-...

[sanderjd]

Thanks! This is very neat.

BTW, I went to your website looking for this, but didn't find your blog. I do now see that it's linked in the footer, but I was looking for it in the hamburger menu.

[brandonb]

Thanks! We need to re-do the top navigation / hamburger menu -- we've added a bunch of new things in the past few months, and it badly needs to be re-organized.

[smugma]

Very interesting. I am keenly interested in this space and coincidentally had my blood drawn this morning.

That said, have you considered that “Measure 100+ biomarkers with a single blood draw” combined with "heart health is a solved problem” reads a lot like Theranos?

[brandonb]

FWIW, the single blood draw is 6-8 vials -- so we're not claiming to get 100 biomarkers from a single drop. The point of that is mostly that it just takes one appointment / is convenient.

[mkeoliya]

This is very cool work! I have a quick follow-up: in the biomarker prediction task, what horizon (ie. how far into the future) did you set for the predictions? Prediction is hard beyond an hour, so it'd be impressive if your model handles that.

[brandonb]

The prediction task is set up as predicting the next measured biomarkers based on a week of wearable data. So it's not necessarily predicting into the future, but predicting dataset Y given dataset X.

The specific biomarkers being predicted are the ones most relevant to heart health, like cholesterol or HbA1c. These tend to be more stable from hour to hour -- they may vary on a timescale of weeks as you modify your diet or take medications.

[volkk]

oh nice, i actually used you guys for some labs a few months ago. Glad you're competing with function & superpower

[mandeepj]

Appreciate your work! Healthcare is a regulated industry. Everything (Research, proposals, FDA submissions, Compliance docs, Accreditation Standards, etc.) is documented and follows a process, which means there's a lot of thesis. You can't sneak in anything unverified or unreliable. Why does healthcare need a JEPA\World model?

[brandonb]

Regulation is quickly catching up to modern AI techniques; for the most part, the approach is to verify outputs rather than process. For example, Utah's pilot to let AI prescribe medications has doctors check the first N prescriptions of each medication. Medicare is starting to pay for AI-enabled care, but tying payment to objective biomarkers like cholesterol or blood pressure actually got better.

[tomrod]

I've been working to understand the potential uses for JEPA. Outside of video, has anyone made a list of any type (geared towards dummies like me)?