

Ep51 Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough | Bots Overtake Humans | Rickard Hansson
Moderna and Merck have reported the first positive Phase 3 result for a personalised cancer vaccine — an mRNA therapy built for one patient at a time, given alongside Keytruda in high-risk melanoma. The market moved 162% on it in a month. Rickard Hansson makes the point almost nobody else is making: the AI doing the work here is not the AI you think it is. It's a ranking model, frozen in 2021, and regulation means it cannot be improved mid-trial. It didn't make a better drug. It changed the cost curve of designing one. Then the other story. Agentic traffic on OpenRouter has reached a seven-day average of 7.3 trillion tokens — close to five times what humans generate, and up roughly 14x since February. Nobody asked for that. Sub-agents did, and they spend your budget without asking. Ben and Rickard get into what "34 markers" actually means, why output tokens are the ones that hurt, why legal is the fastest-growing group using AI at work, and what happens when the software decides how much of your money it spends. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Welcome and Agenda 01:30 AI Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough 03:40 Biotech Market and AI Impact 05:03 Trial Results and Stock Surge 07:22 How the AI Model Works 09:51 Regulation and Update Limits 14:28 Timeline to Approval 16:28 Bots Overtake Humans 17:52 Sub Agents and Token Costs 24:59 Enterprise Usage by Function 25:52 EU AI Act and Legal Risks 27:02 Measuring ROI and Wrap Up 30:36 Closing and Next Topics 🔗 SOURCES AND LINKS The Phase 3 result https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-and-modernas-personalized-cancer-vaccine-slows-recurrence-ph-3-trial The earlier Phase 2b data (KEYNOTE-942) https://www.merck.com/news/moderna-and-merck-announce-mrna-4157-v940-an-investigational-personalized-mrna-cancer-vaccine-in-combination-with-keytruda-pembrolizumab-met-primary-efficacy-endpoint-in-phase-2b-keynote-94/ Token usage by type — the chart we discuss https://openrouter.ai/rankings The a16z chart pack https://a16z.news/subscribe EU AI Act, Article 50 — the transparency rules mentioned https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/ Rickard Hansson on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickardh/ Ben Drakes on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-drakes/ 👤 GUEST Rickard Hansson is the founder of Gainable, building internal applications from enterprise data rather than prompts. He previously founded Weavy and Incentive, and works with organisations from the Fortune 50 to NATO. 🎙️ ABOUT The AI Outcomes Podcast, hosted by Ben Drakes. Conversations with the people actually putting AI to work in enterprise sales and go to market. New episodes weekly, with this AI news strand every fortnight. #AIOutcomes #EnterpriseAI #AIinHealthcare #mRNA #AIAgents #AIStrategy
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