Research rethink at Roche Roche’s project might have Pharma has seen similar agility-driven, time-and cost-saving normally cost $150,000 and advancements that led to better outcomes—and not just in response to the pandemic. taken six months, but with Researchers at Roche used specialized NLP systems in a the reimagined cloud process, particularly novel way: To mine social media conversations it only cost $10,000 and was to better understand symptoms that impact Parkinson’s patients. It was a new approach to data sourcing and completed in just 11 days. analysis—both of which are native to the cloud—to rethink a traditional research process. This was possible because of the exponential improvements in NLP tools such as GPT-3. This technology lives and grows only on the cloud; the 昀椀eld of NLP in the past three years has seen an increase of 15,000x in parameters supported and a proportional jump in compute power. Previously, GPT-3 had been used mostly to produce press releases, technical manuals and even computer code, but had yet to be commonly integrated into business processes. Ever–ready for every opportunity 23