AI Program Appointed to Board of Directors of V.C. Company

 Artificial Intelligence  

Deep Knowledge Ventures, a company that focuses on age-related disease drugs and regenerative medicine projects, says an artificial intelligence program, called VITAL, will be used to make investment recommendations about life sciences firms by poring over large amounts of data.

A Hong Kong V.C. firm Deep Knowlege Ventures has just named an artificial intelligence tool to its board of directors. This is probably more of a media stunt than reality, however the move does signal that AI is more and more influencing business and that technological unemployment will affect nearly every human job very soon.

A press release from Aging Analytics UK, a company that conducts research on biotechnology and regenerative medicine, made two announcements recently: first, that they’ve launched an new AI tool called VITAL (Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences); and second, that they have licensed VITAL to Deep Knowledge Ventures, where the tool will become an “equal member of its Board of Directors.”

"Our eventual goal is to develop VITAL such that it is capable of making autonomous investment decisions."

In effect that means it’ll have exactly the same power as a living, breathing, presumably college-educated human being.

VITAL uses machine learning to predict which life science companies will make for successful investments, the press release explains. Deep Knowledge Ventures, which “routinely invest[s] in both private and public companies specializing in biotechnology, regenerative medicine, oncology, drug discovery, bioinformatics and personalized medicine,” will use VITAL for this analysis.

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While the software won't literally sit around the board room table with the other members, Deep Knowledge’s senior partner, Dmitry Kaminskiy, is enthusiastic about the idea.

“The prospect for utilizing this approach in portfolio management is very attractive,” he said in the release. “We were attracted to a software tool that could in large part automate due diligence and use historical data-sets to uncover trends that are not immediately obvious to humans that are surveying top-line data.”

Kaminskiy told BetaBeat more about having a robot as a board member. "On the meetings investors will firstly discuss the analytical reviews made by VITAL. All the decisions on investing will be made strictly after VITAL provides it’s data," he said. "We say that VITAL has been acknowledged as an equal member of the board of directors, because it’s opinion (actually, the analysis) will be considered as probably the most important one. So basically yes, it will be incorporated into meetings."

Kaminsky continued, "Humans are emotional and subjective. They can make mistakes, but unlike the machines they can make brilliant intuitive decisions. Machines like VITAL use only logic. The intuition of the human investors together with machine’s logic with give a perfect collaborative team. The risk of the mistake will be minimized."


SOURCE  BetaBeat

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