Sunghee Yun

Co-founder & CTO @ Erudio Bio, Inc., KFAS-Salzburg Global Leadership Initiative Fellow @ Salzburg Global Seminar, Adjunct Professor @ Sogang University, Advisory Professor @ DGIST

Abstract

This talk explores the transformative convergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and biotechnology, examining how AI’s rapid evolution from Big Data and Deep Learning to Large Language Models (LLMs), generative AI (genAI), and now Agentic AI is revolutionizing healthcare. The presentation traces AI’s unprecedented development trajectory, highlighting key milestones from the 2012 AlexNet breakthrough through the 2017 Transformer architecture to today’s multimodal AI agents. Market indicators demonstrate AI’s explosive growth, with ChatGPT reaching 35 million users in just 5 months and over $28.2 billion in cumulative AI funding since 2020, signaling we are in the sunrise phase of the AI era.

The talk examines how multimodal AI and agentic systems are creating new paradigms for human-AI collaboration in healthcare. By integrating data from multiple modalities—text, images, audio, and video—these AI agents can understand complex environments and provide contextual responses that enhance diagnostic capabilities. The presentation emphasizes how LLMs connect the non-linguistic world through natural language structures, enabling AI to bridge medical imaging with linguistic systems to create powerful tools for enhanced diagnostics and personalized patient care.

The biotechnology section demonstrates AI’s critical role in addressing biology’s grand challenges, from AlphaFold’s solution to the 50-year-old protein folding problem to emerging trends in personalized medicine and AI-driven drug discovery. The seminar highlights how AI processes exponentially growing genetic sequence data to enable breakthrough applications in drug discovery and regenerative medicine. However, the presentation emphasizes that the limiting factor remains the quality and quantity of biological data, making bio data integration essential for realizing AI’s full potential in building tomorrow’s healthcare through human-centered innovation.