MetaMed Research was an American medical consulting firm aiming to provide personalized medical research services. It was founded in 2012 by Michael Vassar (previously of the

Singularity Institute The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), is a non-profit research institute focused since 2005 on identifying and managing potential existential risks from artifi ...

Jaan Tallinn Jaan Tallinn (born 14 February 1972) is an Estonian computer programmer and investor known for his participation in the development of Skype and file-sharing application FastTrack/Kazaa. Recognized as a prominent figure in the field of artificia ...

(co-founder of

Skype Skype () was a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for IP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also had instant messaging, file transfer, ...

and

Kazaa Kazaa Media Desktop ( ) (once stylized as "KaZaA", but later usually written "Kazaa") was a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. Kazaa was subsequ ...

Zvi Mowshowitz Zvi Mowshowitz is an American writer and member of the rationalist community who primarily discusses new developments in artificial intelligence. He is a former competitive '' Magic: The Gathering'' player and was CEO of MetaMed. Career Mowsho ...

, and Nevin Freeman with startup funding from Silicon Valley investor

Peter Thiel Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. According ...

. MetaMed stated that its researchers were drawn from top universities, as well as prominent technology companies such as Google. Many of its principals were associated with the

Rationalist movement In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "the position that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge", often in contrast to other possible s ...

Concept

Vassar founded MetaMed to apply the principles of rationality as taught by

Eliezer Yudkowsky Eliezer S. Yudkowsky ( ; born September 11, 1979) is an American artificial intelligence researcher and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence. He is the founder of and ...

to medicine, having left Yudkowsky's

to do so. MetaMed was intended to provide an alternative to typical healthcare by providing higher quality research. Vassar explained,

Services

Company researchers gathered detailed medical information on each client, using this as the basis for the creation of personalized research reports for various conditions (or, in some cases, for the purpose of client performance enhancement). It also assessed the expected value of various tests, and created maps of correlations between possible medical conditions. One aim of the company was to aid doctors with advanced

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

and data from information experts. MetaMed's personalized medical research services were targeted at the market for

concierge medicine Concierge medicine, also known as retainer medicine, is a relationship between a patient and a primary care physician in which the patient pays an annual fee or retainer. In exchange for the retainer, doctors agree to provide enhanced care, includ ...

, with prices ranging from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands.

Termination

By 2015, MetaMed was defunct, which Tallinn attributed to the difficulty of producing research results and limited interest from consumers.

References

{{LessWrong Defunct health care companies of the United States American transhumanists