Interjecting with a fact. Moderna described the neoantigen immunogenicity prediction algorithm they used to design the vaccines as “a deterministic machine learning (ML) algorithm,” so it may be a small neural network or more traditional algorithm, probably not deep learning.
Sorry--I was unclear. I was specifically responding to the OP's "CEOs these days want to join the AI hype wave" claim. My point was that the "hype wave" OP is referencing is really about deep learning, not what we think of as traditional statistical learning. Even the dedicated medical AI startups of that era, like BenevolentAI, were still doing traditional ML in 2014. So if Moderna really was trying to join the "AI hype train" and announce a deep learning result with this treatment, they'd be announcing that they successfully trained a deep neural network for drug discovery 12 years ago.