Why Healthcare Needs Its Own Foundation Models | Ortet Founder & CEO Kyunghyun Cho

One of the world’s leading AI researchers has big plans for healthcare. And Thoreau just committed $500 million to bring that vision to life.

This week, we are the first to sit down with Ortet founder and CEO Kyunghyun Cho to talk about the frontier AI lab for health. After helping shape some of the technologies behind modern AI and selling his last AI startup to Genentech, Kyunghyun is now taking on a much bigger challenge: building a foundation model that can learn across biological, clinical, and operational data to deliver predictably better care.

We cover:

• Why healthcare needs its own foundation models, and the “cold start” problem he thinks it can solve

• What Ortet plans to do differently from general-purpose AI companies

• Why Ortet secured $500 million before it had even really gotten started

• What buying AI compute and a lobster roll have in common

• How KC’s own experience with cancer shaped his vision for more predictable healthcare