Daphne Koller Quotes
13 quotes from Daphne Koller — Co-founder of Coursera and founder of Insitro (AI-driven drug discovery)..
“The world is noisy and messy. You need to deal with the noise and uncertainty.”
“As a society, we can and should invest more money in education.”
“Our approach to education has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance: From middle school through college, most teaching is done by an instructor lecturing to a room full of students, only some of them paying attention.”
“I would like to make it so that education was a right, and not a privilege.”
“Start marching forward, even when into the new and unknown, and don't be deterred by obstacles.”
“15 years ago, you had breast cancer. Now you no longer have breast cancer because it's not one disease. You might have a BRCA positive breast cancer, or you might have a HER2+ breast cancer, or a triple-negative. And each of those has a different therapeutic intervention that has much greater efficacy because it ties back to some underlying core biology —which is different in different people. And you can only do that with a lot of very granular data. And the only way to interpret that granular data is with the tools of AI because the human mind just simply cannot encompass that complexity.”
“With most drugs, we do not understand why they work.”
“What I really wanted to build was a company that rethought drug discovery and development from the ground up, using machine learning as a foundational tool.”
“I don't know what genius is, but I can tell you that one of the things that I consider to be my superpower, trying to avoid that female imposter syndrome, is that ability to connect the dots across different disciplines and see connections that are oftentimes maybe obvious in retrospect, but weren't obvious at the time.”
“My concern about AI in science isn't the distant risk of superintelligence, but the erosion of rigor from the seductive plausibility of generative AI. In a scientific setting, an AI hallucination isn't just an error; it's a convincing falsehood that can launch a multimillion-dollar research program down the wrong path.”
“I felt very humbled and unworthy, and one might even say that much of my career journey following the MacArthur Award was an attempt to kind of pay it back, to prove myself as having deserved that.”
“When I graduated with my PhD from Stanford in 1993, you couldn't actually say you were doing AI because people would treat you as if you weren't a serious researcher.”
“I think we've been living on an exponential curve for multiple decades and the thing about exponential curves is they are very misleading things. In the early stages people basically take the line between whatever we were last year, and this year and they interpolate linearly, and they say, God, things are moving so slowly.”
