AI and biotechnology can already be used to shorten the development time of a Covid-19 vaccine.
Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
Said for an organisation they lead or work for; it counts on both records.
What would count as true or false
Judge as of May 2020. True: credible evidence shows that AI and computational biology methods were by then being used in Covid-19 vaccine development in ways that shortened timelines (e.g., computational sequence design, AI-guided antigen selection). Mostly true: such methods were in use and plausibly accelerated work, but the time savings were only partly attributable to AI. Mixed: computational methods were used, but sources disagree about whether AI meaningfully shortened development. Mostly false: the methods contributed only marginally, and the acceleration came mainly from other factors (e.g., the mRNA platform, funding, parallel trials), so the claim overstates AI's role. False: there is no evidence AI or biotech simulation was being used to shorten Covid-19 vaccine development by that date.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (3)
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E1 What AI Can–and Can't–Do in the Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine IEEE Spectrum · 29 September 2020
““The team at Inovio waited enthusiastically for the genetic sequence of the virus to be posted online,” says Kate Broderick, senior vice president of R&D at Inovio. “When it was uploaded by the Chinese authorities on January 10, our scientists immediately entered the sequence into our algorithm, and within 3 hours they had a fully designed and optimized DNA medicine vaccine,” she says.”
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E2 What AI Can–and Can't–Do in the Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine IEEE Spectrum · 29 September 2020
““I suspect that all the pharma companies who developed a vaccine also ran a computational analysis.””
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E3 What AI Actually Did During the COVID-19 Pandemic leadmonitor.ai
“However, the speed of mRNA vaccine development was primarily driven by traditional methods and prior coronavirus research, not by AI.”
Reasoning
E2 reports that Inovio entered the SARS-CoV-2 sequence into its algorithm on January 10 and had a designed, optimized DNA vaccine within 3 hours. That is computational sequence design in use well before May 2020. E3 suggests computational analysis was widespread among vaccine developers. However, E4 states that the speed of mRNA vaccine development was driven mainly by traditional methods and prior coronavirus research, not AI, so the time savings are only partly attributable to these methods.
Cite this claim
Ray Kurzweil, “AI and biotechnology can already be used to shorten the development time of a Covid-19 vaccine.” (said May 2020). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_dc8d982ea8a7, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_dc8d982ea8a7
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Ray Kurzweil
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Mostly false
“Right now, you’re getting back about four months a year.”
Currently scientific progress gives back about four months of life expectancy per year.
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Mostly false
“And then AlphaFold 2 in 2022 went through 200 million proteins and got the shape exactly correct, and that’s going to help come up with new medications.”
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Resolved true
“As of two or three years ago, we had gone through 170,000 proteins.”
As of two or three years ago, 170,000 proteins had been worked through by people.
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Mixed
“The current method for testing these few treatments is to organize a few hundred human subjects and then test them over about a year and a half, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.”
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Mostly true
“Very often, the first several solutions tested on humans are not ideal and lead to other solutions that also take a few years to develop and test.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.