InstaDeep, a startup from Tatooine, was acquired for $682 million by BioNTech -- er, make that Tataouine, the city in Tunisia that Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home planet in the fictional universe of Star Wars, was named after.

"When the Covid-19 pandemic ground the world to a halt, InstaDeep trained a large language model to accurately predict new, dangerous variants before they spread."

"We took transformers already pre-trained on all proteins that existed and then altered the language of SARS-CoV-2. We tried to see if we could predict to some level of accuracy whether or not something could be high-risk. It turned out that it worked. All the variants we identified as potentially dangerous were later confirmed as concerning by the World Health Organization."

How InstaDeep became Africa’s biggest AI startup success

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