"The Model Is a Black Box" Is the Biggest Excuse Costing Biotech Billions
"The Model Is a Black Box" Is the Biggest Excuse Costing Biotech Billions By Fatma Elzahraa Eid , PhD | TheBioMLClinic I have sat across the table from CEOs and program leads who will not touch machine learning. Not because they evaluated it and found it lacking. Because someone, at some point, told them it was a black box, and that was the end of the conversation. They heard: we cannot know what it does, we cannot trust what it gives us, and nobody can be held responsible when it fails. So they decided the safe move was not to use it at all. I have also sat in rooms where a model outputs a candidate. A sequence, a molecule, a target prediction. Someone asks why this one. The answer, delivered with the mild authority of a settled fact, is: "It's a black box. We can't really know. But the confidence score is high." Nobody flinches. The meeting moves on. The candidate goes forward. The phrase produces both responses. Fear on one side of the table, blind trus...