Scott Penberthy
Cat Memes to Cancer
With Lee Hood at the Google Cancer AI Symposium — 2,000 world experts convened since founding
I've spent 30 years at the intersection of AI and visual understanding. Now I see something others don't: the same architectures that understand video at planetary scale can transform how we diagnose and treat cancer. The math is the same. The stakes are existential.
We will eradicate disease in our lifetime.
Currently
At Google, I build AI trained on billions of hours of video — now creating media at 1/1000th the cost, a multi-billion dollar business. The same models are becoming viable for drug discovery.
- Board Member — Lustgarten Foundation (pancreatic cancer research)
- Advisor — Stanford Medical School Tumor Board
- Advisor — NASA Frontier Development Lab
- Contributor — Pharmacogenomics Standards
Previously
- Advised on $2B+ in healthcare AI investments
- Google Cloud's go-to keynote speaker on the art of the possible with AI — 300+ talks to heads of state, sovereign wealth funds, Fortune 500 boards
- CTO Office, Google Cloud (8 years)
- Co-founded Google Cloud's Biopharma unit (now $XB ARR)
- Built video AI systems serving billions of users
- Led engineering at Photobucket (1B+ images)
- PhD in AI (MIT → UW), 2 MS, BS in Computer Science — MIT at 16
I Work With
- Sovereign wealth funds shaping national AI strategy
- Pharmaceutical leaders navigating AI + drug discovery
- Boards vetting AI investments
- Healthcare investors validating technical theses
Stay in Touch
I share what I'm seeing at the frontier — AI, oncology, where capital is moving. Occasional emails, no noise.
Photobucket → Google Video AI → Cancer Research. The through-line took 30 years to see. The same models that track a car chase can track tumor progression. The same embeddings that understand a movie scene can understand tissue over time.