The Aussie Man Who Used AI To Create A Cancer Cure For His Dog

Welcome to this special emergency edition of the Core Memory Podcast. This is Ashlee Vance, and we are— we're going remote today. We're not, we're not in studio because we've had to track down a man in Australia, a man and his dog. Welcome, Paul Cottingham, to the show. Thank you for joining us.

Hi, Ashlee Vance.

How you doing?

Yeah. I'm, as mentioned, pretty tired.

You're tired.

It's been a hectic couple of days. Yeah.

Yeah, as well. So if people haven't been paying attention, you're tired because I guess it was maybe US time last Friday, I think, or it could have been Saturday, a story came out in Australia about you using artificial intelligence technology to, to try to cure your dog's cancer. And this story caught the world's attention. And I, I suspect you've been in demand for the last couple days.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, uh, yeah, I've been averaging about 2 to 3 hours sleep for the last 3 days.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. So, Many people will have, will have seen, I think, you know, some of the news stories and the coverage, but for those people who haven't, I apologize for making you repeat yourself, but do you mind, do you mind giving us the basics and then we'll, we'll dive a bit deeper into the story?

Um, sure, sure, Ashlee Vance. The Cliff Notes version is, uh, my dog Rosie was misdiagnosed with cancer for about 11 months. So, her, my original, her original vet misdiagnosed the cancer. He said it was just a rash for 11 months. And then, um, around the 11-month mark, I said, look, it was like bleeding through the skin. I'm like, that can't be good. Let's remove it. Removed it, came back, uh, off to the biopsy, and it was cancer. Um, and then put her through a whole round of traditional treatments to try bash it back, because if you, you know, if you get, if you nip it in the bud early enough, you can with cancer, you can, for the most part, get rid of it. But unfortunately, Rosie had already passed that threshold. We had grown so far around her skin that if we removed that chunk of skin, she wouldn't have had enough skin left to close the wound. And that's essentially the trigger that I was like, okay, I'm going to try to see what I could do with my AI skills. I knew nothing about cancer at this stage, by the way. Complete novice, just knew obviously that it's like a very bad thing to have. And yeah, and I'd heard about this. I've been practicing machine learning since about 2009. And through the community, obviously followed AlphaGo and knew that the follow-on technology was AlphaFold, that a lot had been said about its ability to like design cancer drugs. So that's the path essentially that led me to going down this AI track.

Yeah. And I think Rosie's— Rosie's in the room, right?

She is. Um, she's up there.

She's there. There she is. Okay. And, and so, you know, and part of the story I think that caught everybody's attention was this idea of, of, like you said, somebody who is not coming from the biotech world, uh, using these tools to create a personalized cancer therapy for, for their pet. And, and from everything I've read, you essentially did a sequence of, of Rosie's tumor and you, you were able to match that against a gene sequence of her blood to begin looking for, um, the variations between, between where her DNA should be and, and what had changed. And then you worked with some amazing, it sounds like, scientists and doctors in Australia to then, to then shape a, a custom mRNA vaccine. And so you're, you're essentially delivering a injection into Rosie with this custom therapy that is then going to get her body to try to attack, attack the tumor based on these DNA markers that, you'd identified. Is that the gist of it?

Essentially, but just to backtrack a little bit for the audience that are listening in, when I essentially started down this path, I think I actually recorded the initial prompt somewhere. I should probably show that sometime. But I went into ChatGPT and just like told it to like list out a plan of like how we can go through the steps of making some kind of drug or treatment to fight it. But I also, similar to before doing that, prior to that, I also used ChatGPT to sort of build out a map. I used Obsidian, if you've ever used Obsidian, to build, it's like a markdown note-taking tool. And I went in and created an ontology, like the lay of the land of all the drugs that were out there and what they do and what they're trying to, what their mechanisms are and stuff., and I learned about this new, well, relatively new to me. I'm not an oncologist, so that's my disclaimer. I've been doing machine learning for a while. It's what I do. But yeah, I learned about immunotherapy. So the key thing about immunotherapy is that it's using your body's own immune system to fight the cancer. And to even backtrack this a little bit more, It's worth speaking a little bit about what cancer actually is. So if you rewind the clock all the way back to, I don't know, when life began type thing, there were single-celled organisms floating around. And at some stage they decided to become multicelled organisms that work together to become animals and plants and fungi and everything. Cancer is when one of those cells in the organism sort of breaks away and starts doing its own thing. Okay. And, um, uh, the immune system essentially evolved to be this mechanism to sort of keep everything, to keep you, to keep your body in line. Um, and that's, and that's why immunotherapy is so important. Like, it's, it's one of the most important, like, things to realize in fighting cancer is, uh, you want to kind of leverage your immune system as much as possible to, to, to fight cancer because, um, One of the things cancer can do is it can, it's got the ability to, so you and I right now have cells going rogue all the time. So like we have like these cells, they mutate, they start doing weird things and your immune system goes in there and just like nukes it, just gets rid of it. But like a once in a billion, I don't know what the actual number is, chance the mutated cell will gain the ability to go into like stealth mode. And then the immune system can't see it anymore. And that's when, like, it starts— that's when it actually starts to get bad. Um, so that— so, so that's a lot. So a long answer to your question, but the key thing is that that's why immunotherapy is so important.

Yeah, no. And so you had already done surgeries with Rosie. You had done chemotherapy, which is a bit more of a blunt instrument where you're, you're kind of killing all sorts of cells. And then I think, you know, part of the point you're making with the immunotherapy is you can turn on your body's own immune system to go hunt down these very specific cells that are tied to this tumor and get your body working on tamping down the cancer.

Correct. So I'll give you something as well. The mRNA vaccine was like the computationally designed mRNA vaccine for a dog, to be very clear, for a dog. I believe, to my knowledge, that was a world first. It's been done for humans, but for dogs, I believe it was a world first. That was kind of like the crown jewel in the protocol that Rosie received, but it was not the only thing. So the other thing that I worked really hard with, ChatGPT-01 was the champion in this part of the story. Is, uh, I developed what's called— this term's been used a lot in machine learning, but it actually is used in other domains as well, which is, um, the word multimodal. So I developed a multimodal therapy for Rose. Um, and what that means is I attacked the cancer from using different vectors, like different modes of operation. So the crown jewel to attack, to do the attacking, was the MRNA vaccine that was trained using those very specific neoantigens that we discovered through all this computational work. So that was like the sniper. It was like we were— the mRNA is like painting a target. It's like the laser. I mean, saying, go hunt that. But we also need to apply all these other pressure points to the cancer to get it to to maximize the effect of the mRNA vaccine. So we co-administered, so we had the vaccine, we obviously went through that protocol. We co-administered with something called a PD-1 inhibitor. And what that is, is cancer has like, I've already talked about this idea of like gaining stealth mode. Part of that is gains the mutation to present something that's called PD-L1 across its surface. And what happens is when you have these trained T cells coming in that we've trained using the mRNA vaccine, we've trained them, they're like specialists, they're the special forces coming in to take out the cancer. The PD-L1 on the surface of the cancer like, it like binds to the T cells and tells them to deactivate and they just stop. They just look, they're coming in like 1,000 miles an hour and they hit the PD-L1 and it just switches them off. So we co-administered a PD-1 inhibitor. So that means the PD-1 binds to the T cells so that when they're coming in to do the attacking, they already all like have a shield around them. So they're just going to go nuts., and they'll generally keep fighting for about 21 days. Um, yeah, so we, we, we co-administered with the, with the PD-1 inhibitor, and we also co-administered— so it's a multimodal therapy. Uh, we also co-administered it with the tyrosine kinase inhibitor, and what that does is it sort of like, uh, sort of stops the blood flow from these new tumors. It stops them from being able to grow a new blood vessels so that they can no longer, like, breathe, essentially. We're reducing the oxygen to them. And we were also blocking c-KIT. So c-KIT is one of the primary proteins responsible for Rosie's cancer. It's essentially like this protein that— it's a very common cancer in dogs. And when it gets left on, it causes the cells to just keep it's like leaving the switch, it's like the on switch has been left on through mutation and it just causes them to keep dividing.

So, and okay.

Sorry, that's a very long answer to your question. I've actually forgotten what the original question was.

No, no, no, no, no. I mean, this is all great information. I think I should walk us back for a second. I mean, okay, so Rosie at the time was I think like 5 or 6 years old?

Yeah, so that was actually the real tragedy. And like, uh, part of the reason why I decided to help her, because she was only, she was only 5 and a half when she, when she got this. And that's even by dog years is a pretty young.

Yeah. And so, and you get misdiagnosed at first and then you start down the more traditional path for trying to cure the cancer. And then when things aren't, when things aren't working, so you get, you're like, look, I'm going to try anything. Let's see what we can do. And, and so you turn to AI and you told us a little bit about your original prompt, but, but so step one in what it was telling you to do was to go try to get both the tumor and her blood sequenced. Is that, was that step one?

Yes. Yeah. So if you want to go back to the actual process, um, step one was to, um, I fired up ChatGPT and, um, it gave me the steps of what I, so again, just to backtrack, like this was just to do the AlphaFold stage. Um, the, the, the trying to develop a, a drug, uh, it laid out the path to do that. And the first was to go and get Rosie's, um, uh, tumor sequenced and the blood sequenced. And then you line them up against each other and you get like a genetic diff between the two. Or, um, you can kind of, another analogy is think of yourself owning two cars. They're exactly identical. And you, you never drive the first car and you drive the other car 3,000, 300,000 miles or something. You take the engines out and you compare, you know, the difference, the difference is the damage between the two engines. That's essentially what we were doing with this.

And did you, and I saw, I mean, I saw you pull up some of the snippets of the DNA code on your computer. Were you, when you were looking for those differences between the DNA of the tumor and her, her blood DNA, were you doing that yourself? With AI or were you being guided by a scientist or a doctor in that process?

Just, just, just the chatbots.

Okay. Okay. Just the chatbots. And then, so once you, once you saw, once you saw the differences, then you turned to the AI again to try to figure out the nature of the tumor and if there were medicines available for that particular sequence.

Before I answer that, one of the things I was kind of scared of about even the story getting out is like, because I used LLMs to do all of this, I'm just, I don't want to have the LLMs limited in the future to help other people. Essentially, because, you know, now that the story's out, like, you might have your big labs decide to start switching off the ability to do what I did.

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Yeah, correct. So I, I Okay, so I went through the pipeline of assembling the genome. It takes a while because when you get the data back, which is Rosie's, both of the blood sample and the cancer sample were both 300 gigabytes. It doesn't come back and like, here's your DNA. It comes back like in pieces. It's like a giant Lego set that's been put on the floor and you have to put it together. So spent some time putting that together. And then through literature, I knew of CKIT, the primary, like one of the primary proteins that's been identified for driving rare disease cancer. So isolated CKIT and modeled that in AlphaFold. AlphaFold, I'm sure most people know what it is, but it won the Nobel Prize, I believe, in chemistry, and it's a computational thing. So there was a bit of controversy around that because it's like computers shouldn't be winning chemistry things. And the reason it won that is for the first time ever, we are very cheaply able to make 3D models of proteins. Before, it used to take, I think, like a month to see a protein that they used to use like these like sort of like lithography sort of type techniques, I think. Anyways, so yeah, so modeled the protein and then I went looking for like drugs to try block it. And I used genetic algorithms to develop, actually developed like novel compounds and bound them to the protein to try block it from, aka switch it off. If you could do that, then the cancer, you essentially trying to stop the cancer from multiplying. And yeah, so use genetic algorithms to develop like novel compounds. And then I decided against that approach because even though I found some things that were like really strong, it had a high, what's called like binding affinity. I even spoke to chemists about getting it synthesized also at UNSW, the same university that worked very graciously graciously with me throughout the entire process. Um, yeah, uh, I decided against that approach because you would probably have to perform a full drug trial to, to get to the end. So you'd have to go like, uh, you know, in, in, um, in vitro or like in a test tube type thing, then go to mouse models, then go to like, I don't know, generally it's like, you know, monkeys or something. And then humans would have to go through like part of that process before we got to Rosie because it's just too risky. So that was genetic algorithms to bind to the thing. And then the other approach I used was what's called docking. To be very clear, I also use AlphaFold 2 because they changed the license for AlphaFold 3. You're not allowed to do this anymore on AlphaFold 3, which is fair enough. Like it's a hardcore IP and I respect that. But yeah, we use AlphaFold 2 to do the protein modeling. But, um, and the other, the other approach that I used was, uh, what's called docking. And I docked a million ligands, they're called ligands, um, to, uh, the secret protein and found a drug that's owned by a major US drug company, um, that had a really high binding affinity, like really high, like higher than the normal drugs that you can get for this. But I tried to reach out via compassionate use paths, but they are generally for humans. So they just politely declined both through official channels and unofficial channels. So around this stage, I was feeling— this is around July 2025. I'd done all of this stuff by July 2025. And just to point out, like, again, I started with like no knowledge of cancer and putting in, I guess, a couple of hours every single night and like just starting to learn more and more and more. And by this stage, I kind of learned that the whole AlphaFold approach is only part of the solution. So the ability to take a ligand and block the cancer is only one mechanism, going back to that multimodal idea of being able to stop the cancer from doing its thing. And then around July 2025, I tried all this stuff, like gone through all these different computational things, like It was just like AI, AI, AI. But by the way, like the computational pipeline, there's like AI algorithms in there that are all like, that's different AI things as well. It's like different statistical approaches. And one other thing worth mentioning as well is a lot of these tools that I was using are like written by grad students. So like they're highly unoptimized. They're taking like weeks to run and they could probably run like in a day if it was optimized for a GPU or something. A lot of them were like CPU-based.

Sure.

But, um, yeah.

And then, okay. And then, and then, okay. So you're, you're doing all this work. Um, you've, you've reached sort of this next stage of the journey. And then like at some point you have to, you have to switch gears and start to partner up with a scientist who's going to take you to the next, next step.

Um, Yeah, so again, like, I had done all this computational work and it had led to, like, nothing. And I was feeling the wind come out of my sails a little bit, like, you know, I was like, okay, spent some money trying to get the data and that was cool. I've learned about how it all works. That's also cool. Well, not all works, you know, but there's lots to learn. But Um, one day I was taking Rosie for a walk, and, um, it was around July 2025, just down the road here. I had like a light bulb moment go off where it occurred to me that maybe I'm halfway to, um, making an immu— making an immunotherapy treatment myself. So I came home and, uh, jumped on ChatGPT at the time and said, this is all the stuff I've done, everything I've described to you just before. Can we use any of this to make an immunotherapy? And it came back like, sure, you are very close to making a neopeptide vaccine or an mRNA vaccine. And I reached out back to Professor Martin at the University of New South Wales saying, hey, Professor Martin, How hard would it be to like make a neuropeptide vaccine? And he roped in one of his colleagues, Dr. Deborah Burnett. She's like one of the most prestigious researchers here in Australia. She's done some cool stuff with animals. And I said, same, same thing, same question. She's like, I don't really know much about that technology, Paul, but I do know a lot about mRNA vaccines. And then obviously I'm like, hold that thought, check it out, check it out on ChatGPT again. And it turned out that like mRNA vaccine would was the fastest way to get a treatment for Rose. So this is, yeah, this is why. So obviously they got excited because now we can potentially close the loop. We've done all this computational work. Now we can maybe get to a treatment. And then with all the other knowledge that I've gained around doing this, just attack it from as many different vectors at the same time. Yeah.

So Yeah, sorry, go ahead, go ahead.

No, no, no, uh, sorry, just, uh, feel free to shoot.

Well, okay, so then you, you get— you, you team up with these two, two scientists and, and then you guys go do it. You go create a personalized, a personalized mRNA vaccine for Rosie.

Yeah, so yeah, um, run some more computational stuff, um, a whole bunch of different things we did. But long story short, got to the neoantigen selection. And yeah, it's actually possible to take the antigens we discovered and you just paste them into— what I did is I just pasted them into Gemini and it gives you back a vaccine construct. But I double-checked it with Grok. Grok actually found some errors in it and corrected them. The final vaccine construct was developed by Grok. I was also using Grok throughout the process as well. Long story short, I had this vaccine construct. It's literally half a page of text. I emailed that to Professor Pally, who I'd been working with throughout the last 6 months-ish, through emails and stuff. And we sort of developed a plan to have it manufactured. But all throughout this process, I was very well aware of the fact that we had to have an ethics approval because this was like an experimental, you know, it's essentially a drug trial. So in the background, I was working like really hard to try to get that ethics approval. I'm doing all the computational stuff in parallel with doing the ethics approval. And it got— we got to a point where I was writing this ethics approval every 2 hours every night, also using LLMs to assist. A lot of this was all me injecting myself into it, thinking of what things we haven't thought of yet, but just using the LLMs to sort of fill in the— to fill it out a bit. And yeah, it got to a point where the university was going to have to modify its license with the state because the vaccine was gonna be administered by her vet. And that meant that it was offsite. So because it was offsite, uh, they're gonna have to mon— and mon— going through the whole process of modifying the, the, the, the, the license was gonna take like 8 months. So again, I was like, you know, like going, I've gone through all this work. Like we, we've, we've got the vaccine, it's actually ready to go. Like we actually have the green light. We were ordering in the plasmids and everything to get it ready to manufacture. But the ethics was like a red light. And then sort of a twist of fate intervened. Tom from UNSW had released an earlier article about the AlphaFold work that I did around July 2025. One of like the most prestigious canine cancer researchers on planet Earth reached out to me as a result of it. Uh, Dr. Mary, I think she's like used to work for DARPA. Um, she reached out to me and, uh, she's like, Paul, like, what are you doing? Like, what, what is all this stuff? And I sort of told her, um, and, um, as for part of the protocol, I was doing some research into this thing called adjuvants, which is like a, a thing you add to the vaccine to get the immune system to sort of pick it up. And I was trying to figure out like how we could legally get hold of this to add it to the protocol. And, um, I reached out to Mary, uh, around October, November to ask about that question. And I was talking like, uh, juvence, juvence, also ethics approvals. I'm having like, sorry, sorry. So she forwarded me on to Professor Rachel in Queensland who she had funded. She had funded Professor Rachel to do some separate research in this domain. And yeah, I got on a call with Rachel telling her about all this and then Ashlee Vance, Ashlee Vance, Ashlee Vance. And then I mentioned like, just like briefly, like, and like ethics approvals, man, like I'm trying so hard to get this and gone through all this, like all the stuff in the background. Like I could talk another hour about all the stuff we did there. But long story short, she's like, oh yeah, I have the ethics approval for that. For that exact thing. And I'm like, and then the next thing she said was like, yeah, I'll take you under my wing. I'm like, I'll just like playing it really cool. Like, oh yeah, cool. Yeah, no worries. But in my mind I was like, like, you know, like fist pumping. Yeah.

And so, and so like all told, how long, like just to get to that part of the journey, how, how much time was that?

So, so we started, We started again, I started sort of trying to do my own thing. Um, not really, not really my own thing, but you know, like just trying to see what I can do in my own time around, uh, November 2024. AlphaFold stuff, uh, was up to about July 2025. And, um, the vaccine creation and ethics approval was around November 2025.

And then Rosie got the first injection in December, I think?

Early, early December.

Early December, and then she's had one more, or she's had two more. She just had her third, right?

So just to interject, I'll say two more things about this. So Dr. Rachel is 1,000 kilometers north from where I live. So she lives in a different state. That's the reason we were able to do this. That state has slightly different laws to this state. Similar to America. And yeah, so I drove 1,000 kilometers north in December and we did what's called the induction phase. So we inducted Rosie into the protocol. But I thought that university was like in the city Brisbane. I live in Sydney. The city is Brisbane. I thought it was like in the city, like the The pet, the, the, the veterinary, the School of Veterinary Medicine is about 4 hours outside of the city. So, so I drove, I drove up to 1,000 kilometers north and then to get the induction phase done, I drove like 4 separate times for 4 hours each time to get that done. Um, so Rosie's had that, that was the induction phase and then she came back to Sydney. Started to see the results that have been like, I shared those pictures on, on, on X. And yeah, since then she's had, I've driven back up to Queensland one more time for a booster shot. She has, she has additional booster shots coming up as well.

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Yeah. So like, look, initially I was— before the protocol was administered, I was absolutely shitting myself because it was like a completely novel You know, Professor— I remember like Professor Rachel saying to me like, now it's like in God's hands. Like we're like, now we hope and pray. Like, uh, it's— and after the first shot was administered and, um, like for the first 2-ish weeks it actually started to get bigger, the cancer. But this is Actually, it's generally a good sign in immunotherapy because what it means is the T cells are swarming to the cancer sites and are actually infiltrating and swelling up and like going around and doing their killing thing. So initially, like the tumors like got very, they started swelling up and it looked pretty bad.

And then Yeah.

And then, and then through, through January, I started to be like, I could start seeing her like tendon on the back of her leg again. Like I hadn't seen it in like 8 months or something. Uh, it'd just been swollen. And, uh, I'm like, is this thing working? And it just kept, it just kept shrinking. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was ridiculous. And, uh, after the last booster shot, it's done it again. They swelled up and then they shrunk down even more. It's ridiculous. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So this is amazing. Thank you.

To be clear, it's like, I just want to put this on record. It's like not a cure. It's, it's, I, I'm very well aware this is not a cure. It's, it's, it's bought her considerably better quality of life. She was like starting to shut down as, as an animal around December. And now she's like come back to life. When the, when the reporters came around here to take those photos, She was like running around in the garden, like playing with them because they're toys and stuff. She wasn't doing that before. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No. And I, well, thank you so much for walking through that story. I mean, so these are a couple of the questions I wanted to get into. I mean, you said it's not a cure. Um, you know, since you posted this, since the story came out, um, I think as often happens with these things, you know, the first wave was this like amazement from everybody and then. And then people on X and Reddit all start digging in, you know, with their bringing their various contexts to bear on this. And so some people in my science world were grumbling and they said, look, companies like Moderna are already working on these types of therapies for humans. This isn't that big of a deal. And then they said, you know, we don't even know If it is a cure because the, the, the dog's been going through chemotherapy and these other treatments, we don't, you know, you just can't tell which particular—

They weren't working. They weren't working. No.

So this is what I wanted to ask you.

Have you seen, have you seen people pushing back on that and saying, oh, well, I, I, look, the, part of the reason why I haven't slept a lot is, uh, I read a lot, uh, unfortunately made the mistake of reading some of the comments.

Never read the comments.

But I sort of pulled back from that as well. Look, people can feel free to say whatever you want to say. I know what I saw. I know what I did. Before this, Rose was again starting to shut down. The cancer was getting bigger and bigger. Her energy levels were going down. And now I feel like this has brought her more quality of life. And potentially we've extended her life by, I don't know, X amount of months. It's hard to say because this is all new.

And, and like, you know, during when you were telling me what happened, I noticed, I mean, you were emphasizing how much you used AI along this journey there. You know, there's entire Reddit threads where people are saying you could have done this on Google 10 years ago. This is, this is not that big of a deal. All the AI part of this is big and this is not me. Criticizing you because, you know, I, I don't think you're even responsible for having to justify any of this. You're just, you're living your life and, and doing this, this thing for your dog. But I, I assume maybe you saw some of that where people are saying, um, AI wasn't even that big of a deal on all this. But when you walked through the story, I mean, it sounded quite clearly to me like it, it was quite a big deal.

Like LLMs as the orchestration layer. And then we use all these different AI techniques in between to get to the final result. It was all AI and me just like doing stuff in the background.

Yeah. I mean, and I think you are, I mean, everyone seems in agreement that this is the first time there's been this type of personalized therapy for a dog and for an animal. We mentioned before.

So there are, there are like personalized vaccines for dogs, but not computationally designed ones.

Okay.

The first computationally designed, just to be very clear.

Okay.

Yeah.

And then, and then we, and then there are companies like Moderna and others in actual clinical trials for things like this with, with humans. And so I'm just, I'm trying to get at like something about your story has really resonated with people and it seems to be hitting on a couple moments in time to me. Like, one is that a guy who has this clearly, you know, almost 20 years of expertise in the AI field but is not, not coming from the science or medical field was able to, to uplevel your skills in this dramatic way and tackle this problem. And then we're also hitting this moment in time where We are on the cusp of personalized medicine and, and the medical field is not, is really probably not prepared to move at the speed at which people are going to want to try to go, uh, with the tools that are now available to them. I mean, do you, do you kind of feel those two moments colliding in, in your story?

Uh, absolutely. And I feel there's way more, there's like so many sub stories have sort of spawned out of the main one. Yeah, I mean, the medical industry, the whole debate about them moving faster. Again, I'm just an AI person. I'm not an oncologist. I think that with what is possible now, I think this is going to maybe have to force the conversation a little bit more about the usage of the tool, put it that way. Yeah. And the other thing that— there's lots of stories. One thing I just would like to say is, like, people— there's a lot of negativity around AI at the moment. And I think it's been— I genuinely believe, having done this, that it's been framed the wrong way. AI is close to the steam engine. When it was invented, it disrupted civilization fundamentally. Everyone moved to these cities that existed before, but they were nowhere near the scale that were after the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution. It transformed, and that obviously disrupted jobs and how things worked, but people still had to do stuff. I think the same thing is going to happen with this. Like AI is essentially doing the same thing, but like there's going to be so many new industries started as a result of it. Like you just got to choose, it's like AI meets whatever, AI meets biology is what I did here. And this could lead to a whole bunch of like really cool new products that's going to make the world a better place. And if you have an area of expertise, well, I don't know what it, whatever it is, like, if you know, my traditional training is as an electrical and computer systems engineer, that's what I did. So I studied. So if you did like AI meets energy, there's like, like so many cool things you could do there as well. So I think, and it's going to take time to play out as well. So yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I just think there's been so many sub-stories spawned out of it. And yeah, it's just been interesting to see the conversation.

Like, well, yeah, I mean, you said, you said originally you were kind of reluctant to even go public with this stuff. And when that, when that first press release came out in June or July of last year from, from the university, I mean, people it did, it did not capture the public's attention. So now that you've been through this experience, you know, you, you're— it's now turned into this, like, like we just said, sort of like a symbolic moment for, for different things. I mean, did you have— did you, do you, do you kind of regret being public about this at all now? Did you expect any of this when the, the Australian reporter came by last week?

I mean, look, when Tom reached out in 2025, mid-2025, I was like a bit hesitant to talk about it just because again, I didn't want to— I was aware of like the controversy that it could actually cause. Having been in the industry for a while, I've seen a few waves of these like controversial things spawn and then And then also with regards to the Australian reporter, I was told, okay, Paul, you should phone this lady. Her name's Natasha. And I phoned Natasha. She's like, oh yeah, I've heard about this guy. I've heard about this scientist guy who's just helping his dog or something. I'm like, I'm not a scientist. I'm an AI I'm an AI guy. And she's like, what? I started telling her the story. She's like, what? What?

No way.

What?

What?

And then I went to like text and notify the professors that, oh, there might be an Australian reporter trying to get hold of you. And it turned out she's like, yeah, she's already got hold of me. So she went out and like verified the story and then came back and yeah, I think got really excited about it. But yeah, yeah, Ashlee Vance, that's about it.

Well, so like, I mean, you said you were up, you know, late reading all these comments. I mean, so like, has this been— have the last 2 or 3 days— I mean, it's good for the story, is good for Rosie and you and you guys getting to hang out. Have the last like 2 or 3 days been good or bad then?

Well, well, well, well, I think actually Rosie's got the shits with me at the moment because 'Cause I haven't been doing too much hanging out with Rosie. I have, I've still been taking her for walks. I'm still been giving her her medicine. Like she's also on like a little bit of palliative care. She's getting antihistamines to stop with the itching and stuff. But overall she's in, she's in general good spirits. We're about to go to the city after this.

Yeah. And, and, and you're you're just trying to get through this, this wave of attention for a minute and then get back to normal life, I suppose.

Yeah, it's been, it's been nuts.

I mean, do you think this is gonna— has, like, has this altered your, um, what do you do? You run— do you run your own, like, consultancy, your own company?

Yeah, I run a, um, machine learning AI consultancy. Um, I've been doing that for about 7 7 years, 2019. Um, and so like that, as a data scientist.

Okay. And like, is this going to change? Um, you know, is this something you're still going to pursue? Is it, has, do you think this has sort of changed your life in any ways? I suppose. I mean, it's a big story, man.

Um, yeah. Uh, I look, I'll just say this, Ashlee Vance. I think these voices should be done. Yeah, I think there's a lot more to be done. Computation meets biology is arguably one of the biggest new fields that's going to emerge in the next 50 years. I think it's going to be huge.

And this kind of really opened your eyes to that end of AI.

Yeah. I was asked to go to the UNSW Business School about 3 years ago and give a, just give a talk to the students to tell them what to do. Like, um, talk about AI, um, blah, blah. And, uh, and one of the things I said to the students was like, look, I think that like AI meeting biology is going to be the next big thing. I never thought I'd actually play a part in it. Yeah.

Are you, are you South African originally?

You got me. Yeah.

Yeah. So, so, and then how old were you when you moved to Oz?

15, 16.

Okay. Okay. And then you got into AI really early, man.

Yeah. Look, Professor, Dr. Russell Webb, when I did my electrical engineering degree, through pure chance, we had to apply to do a whole bunch for your honors thesis. There were a whole bunch of options. To apply for. And the one that I really wanted to get into at the time was, we had to put a list down of priority of the projects that you wanted to do. And there was a professor over from the States who had worked on one of the NASA rovers, and I was really hoping to get on that one. I love space too. And it turned out I didn't get that one. I got my fourth choice, which was working with Dr. Russell Webb. And Dr. Webb was like, he used to teach us C, like C, and he, I don't know, he used to get into C and he seemed to be pretty bored by the whole lecturing thing. I'm not going to lie. Sorry, Dr. Webb, apologies. But when I was put on his project, he actually was doing machine learning and I got involved in that project and the work that I did for him. He asked me to do a PhD back then. I wish I had, to be honest. I wish I'd done a PhD back then. But yeah, I learned back then. I built a little— it was like a 2-dimensional environment. This is in 2009. I built a 2-dimensional environment where there was just a little robot and I had to navigate to a destination that would just randomly spawn on this 2-dimensional 2D world. And it had no understanding of the mechanics of how to do that. It was a neural network. And I built this environment and was able to train it to do that with not pre-baking in the instructions on how to do it. It was getting a reward signal. It was kind of pseudo-reinforcement learning. And when I saw the like after training it for a bit, when I saw it like learn how to do it, it was like a light bulb moment for me. I was like, holy shit, this is going to be huge. This is going to be freaking huge. Like I didn't put the instructions into this thing on how to do that. It figured it out by itself. So yeah.

Yeah. And then, okay. And then like, as you're getting into this project, I mean, look, obviously you want ultimately to spend more time with your dog and that's, and you want her to feel better, and, and that's why you pursued this. But was there, you know, was there part of you that— obviously it's feeding your interest in AI too. I mean, I mean, you know, was this like a side quest, or did this start to become— you, you could, you could sort of see where this was going and that this, this was kind of proving out something about AI, or was it just very much, I just want to cure my dog?

I mean, all the sort of insights I shared with you, I've been learning them over the years doing— I've worked on many different projects. Like, what my specialty is really is stringing bespoke systems together. I can do it very, very well, especially machine learning, because that's what I do. So a lot of those insights are kind of obvious to me. I know that may sound a bit facetious, but Um, um, they're coming back. I just kind of wanted to help Rose. That was the reason. And then it just kind of grew into what it is now, which is, um, yeah. And then, yeah, I don't—

so sorry, go ahead. No, no, please go.

Uh, yeah, I just think, um, I look, I think like ChatGPT, uh, Gemini and Grok, uh, all the other, like, I'm literally standing on the shoulders of giants. Rose doesn't even care. She's the star of the world in this regard at the moment. She doesn't care at all. But it has significantly, in my experience, without that, without at least even the LLMs, I reckon she would have probably only lasted a year. And now she's almost coming up to 3 years. Which to me is insane. Like, it's, it's insane. Like, uh, and you think some of the reaction to this will be—

because you were saying, oh, I hope they don't turn some of these things off in the AI tools. Like, you— I mean, because it's obvious it's such a positive story overall, but you think some of the reaction will be, oh, this stuff really is powerful, there's going to be people running around making, you know, doing all kinds of weird stuff with biology, which has a long-running fear with AI. But so you think there might be a quite drastic reaction to this?

I think so. I already know that the university that I did all the work with, the amount of inbounds for people wanting to do their own sequencing has gone up 10x already. So I imagine that's probably playing out everywhere at the moment. Yeah.

Yeah. And do you think—

so people are wanting to like get the data and see what they could do.

Do you like, how many people do you think could do what you did? I mean, you're obviously extremely savvy with AI. You had at least a bit of money to pay for the sequencing. Uh, you know, you, you, you weren't a scientist, but you knew, you knew what you were doing in terms of how to use the tools. I, so I assume that like a lot of people would not be able to replicate what you did at this moment in time, but we're obviously also probably not that far off from things like that improving and the AI just really guiding you through the process all the way.

Yeah, sure. Um, I, I think if you spend enough time prompting, you can figure it, figure out your own pipeline. But this is true for anything really. Actually, you just got to have the right determination to want to do it yourself. For me, that determination was Rosie. But yes, there are ways. Making AI defensible is actually a very interesting subtopic we could spend another hour on. And I think there are ways to do that too.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, I've used up a ton of your time. I know you've been stretched thin, so I really appreciate you doing this. And then, I mean, I guess I've asked this question.

I just—

do you— this reminds me of the— I wish I could remember the Russian dog's name that went to space, or— I mean, this is in another Russian moment. I mean, this has like little Sputnik kind of, um, starts with an L, I think. Oh, Laika, I think it was. Yeah. Um, I mean, I feel like Rosie's— Rosie's kind of, kind of in this, this territory now as like the, the AI, AI dog that kicked off some, some crazy new era, possibly.

Yeah, it's super cool. It's really cool. It's really cool. Like, um, and all this, all the different sub-conversations it spawned, I think those are fantastic too. There's been lots of like skeptical takes. I think the skeptical takes are great. You should be skeptical.

Yeah.

Um, yeah.

I mean, there's, there's a guy here, Egan Pelton, who's a chem-bio PhD at Stanford. Um, he's very upset at you, or he's very upset.

At the store, right?

Sorry. You know, he's, he's like, this is ridiculous, everything here could have been done without ChatGPT, the dog is on a conventional immunotherapy with the mRNA vax, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, okay. The, um, and, and, you know, I, I think some of this is besides the point anyway because I, I think this is clearly symbolic of a moment in time. And so, yeah, yeah.

And I'll just say one more thing, uh, Ashlee Vance, um, love your work too, man. When your book first came out, it had just come out in the library and I knew who Elon Musk was. I've actually been following him since SpaceX was founded, actually, because he's South African. That's why.

That's fine.

I was like, yeah. And at the time, like the sheer idea of Um, I think there'd been a whole round of like startups that had tried to do commercial space type stuff. Um, and they'd all failed and then he was going to take his money and throw it behind. So anyways, knew about your book coming out and I, um, it was fresh in the library when I grabbed it and I was working as an electrical engineer at the time and I read the whole thing under the desk. It was like pretty, yeah, it was bold. Anyways.

Oh, that's cool. Thanks, man. Well, I am a fellow South African and my mom is Australian, so We are, we're, we're, we've got multi-bonds going on. Well, Paul, thank you. Thanks so much for your time. We, we wish all the best for Rosie and please like keep us updated on her and, and what you do next, man.

Yeah. Cheers, man. Cheers, man.

The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance, and/or Kylee Robison, or both of Us Together. It is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex Inuon Ventures for all your support, and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again.