AI's promise perversely overshadows weight loss

By Robert Cyran

How much is it worth to make people seem smarter and boost their productivity? The answer is $11 trillion, based on the collective market value added to six technology giants since ChatGPT's initial release to the masses less than three years ago. More telling, however, is that the sum is 27 times what weight-loss drug pioneers Eli Lilly LLY and Novo Nordisk NOVO_B have gained. Such skewed incentives are unhealthy.

Artificial-intelligence exuberance is palpable. Alphabet GOOG, Amazon.com AMZN, Microsoft MSFT, Meta Platforms META, Nvidia NVDA and Oracle ORCL have experienced explosive equity growth, taking the S&P 500 Index SPX along for the ride. Hot startups such as OpenAI now have nearly unlimited funds to invest in anything and everything machine-learning-related. It remains unclear when, or if, the technology will deliver sufficient revenue, profit or more efficient workforces to justify the massive capital expenditure.

By contrast, the early promise of stunningly successful anti-obesity treatments is already fading. Both Lilly and Novo have lost big slugs of their initial valuation gains over the past year even though 40% of U.S. adults are dangerously overweight. Fears that competing drugs and lower prices will erode profit have spooked investors.

The same sort of reservations are pervasive in healthcare. Gilead Sciences GILD, for example, received approval this summer for lenacapavir as an HIV prophylaxis and is nearly 100% effective at prevention. The company's stock price has nearly doubled over five years, but Oracle's has nearly quintupled.

It's a similar story at uniQure, which said last month that its experimental gene therapy for Huntington’s slowed progression of the fatal neurodegenerative disease by 75%. There is currently no approved treatment for some 40,000 people in the United States. UniQure added a well-deserved $1.8 billion of market value from disclosing the lab results, but Nvidia secured 100 times as much after saying it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI to help build data centers stocked with its chips.

Weighing the value of nascent technologies is a fraught exercise. Stock markets aren’t charities either. Tech behemoths are more valuable because they have better track records at generating profit, in part because drugmakers must constantly replace their products when patent protection expires. It's also possible that software companies are vastly overvalued.

Yet it’s hard to shake the simple idea that everyone dies, and some additional time and quality of life are probably worth more to people around the world than scads of simulated human intellect. There may be some valuable overlap between the two, but on the whole the financial motivations are bleakly misaligned.

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CONTEXT NEWS

UniQure said on September 24, that its experimental gene therapy for Huntington’s disease slowed progression of the neurodegenerative brain disorder by 75%, as measured by a widely used clinical scale, at 36 months in patients who received a high dose. The company is aiming to receive U.S. regulatory approval in early 2026.

More than 40,000 people in the United States have the disease, according to a nonprofit organization focused on it. Patients typically die within 20 years of developing symptoms, and there are no approved treatments.