In short - the reason medicine is slow for AI is the same reason it's slow for people -- the REPL loop is slow [1]. If you could pause and rewind time, and had perfect observability into every system, no ethical risks, (things that are free in software engineering, or math problems) then the AI could make massively parallel progress.
However I do think there are opportunities to greatly improve all these fields with AI, I just don't think we should lead with an overpromise that sounds Musk-like.
Yeah, I'm surprised we're all discussing it. I'm open to the idea that AI could help medical research, but just claiming it'll end "alzheimers, cancer, heart disease and mental illness" with absolutely 0 evidence isn't a particularly grounded claim that warrants any discussion.
Honestly, the way he lists them and even pauses before vaguely saying "mental illness" gives a strong impression that he's choosing whatever illnesses he can think of as he goes.
You could have said same when he claimed "90% of code will be written by AI" in the beginning of 2025, but turns out he was right and he foresaw something we didn't.
That prediction (or at least that article) was written in March, and Opus 4.5 was released in November. For my team at least, that was pretty much the point at which 90% of our code became machine written. So that would mean he was only off by 2 months. Maybe 4 or 5 months at most for the point where it became true for basically the entire software industry.
I’m not saying he’ll be right about this one, not it’s a not ridiculous to claim he want fundamentally right about code.
Lines of code have always been a liability not an asset. If I get a PR +500, -800, that achieves the goal set out, and one that is +8300, -1200, which one is better? SOTA LLMs tend to produce the latter and the people least capable of noticing this as something bad are the ones producing the most code. So maybe even _if_ - show me sources - 90% of code is LLM produced, I'm certain it doesn't do 90% of the work.
His toothy smile and nerd-like demeanor are disarming. Before he lost weight it was easy to see him as a well-intentioned non-threatening quantity but it's obvious he's just as unhinged as any of the others.
His statements are based on belief that AI will advance a lot and quickly.
If this happens to be the case - I personally don't see why those statements are not realistic.
All diseases are engineering problems. The bottleneck there is testing etc. Most likely many of them can be cured using existing approach or meds.
Companies grow organs now that can be used to speed up iteration.
Even current AI can solve a LOT of tasks if it has quick feedback loop and can verify results. At the end of the day it can brute-force its way to solution.
AIs intelligence is say average human. Even less, whatever. say it will be as a smart human in a few years.
But it is infinitely scalable.
So is it that unrealistic to assume AI can find a correlation on massive amounts of data and figure our what leads to Alzheimers? (where the solution could be not cure but prevention). I don't think so.
> Most likely many of them can be cured using existing approach or meds.
A wildly absurd claim, especially for some of the most studied diseases in human history. This has only ever been true for a tiny handful of very specific diseases, such as scurvy, in all of human history. Expecting that cancer can be cured or prevented using already existing drugs that we've just not been noticing is complete quackery.
> Even current AI can solve a LOT of tasks if it has quick feedback loop and can verify results.
IF it has a quick feedback loop. You know what definitely DOESN'T have a quick feedback loop? Research into medicine, and biology in general. It takes raw time to find out what the effects of a substance on an organism are, often weeks or months.
> So is it that unrealistic to assume AI can find a correlation on massive amounts of data and figure our what leads to Alzheimers? (where the solution could be not cure but prevention). I don't think so.
Yes. Because we've already run all of the analyses, and we have plenty of observed correlations. What we don't have is the kind of data that can lead to deducing causation - because it's a disease that stays hidden for a long time, it progresses glacially, and the people who have it do or don't do huge amounts of things in the period before getting it and during early onset that are impossible to track or verify - so the data is both gigantic, and extremely incomplete.
He honestly seems to be experiencing some level of mania, which I think a lot of people would if they were constantly in an environment that makes them believe they may have invented god. I do not think he's in his right mind. This is going to end up with a documentary about him, and not the good kind.
Agreed! There was a very good podcast released a few months ago, Black Box The chatbots. It’s generally about AI induced psychosis.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall in some of these orgs, there’s bound to be a few people on the inside going through the same issues.
If you revisit his past writing he has always been this unhinged. Took me too long, but now I see the same craziness in really a lot of what he published
I still don't understand why people don't just openly talk about the obvious fact that a huge percentage of Silicon Valley leaders are on large doses of powerful stimulants.
I don't know if he is in that video or not, or ever, personally, but just in general, it's the Ockham's razor approach any time you see something like this. It's a much more direct and clear explanation than the various more convoluted theories people keep throwing around as to why everyone sounds like a methed-out megalomaniac all the time.
It certainly explains how you get the exact overlap of existential-risk fatalism and Bay Area polycule dynamics. Whos going to tell the artificial children that their parents were a high-functioning doomsday sex cult?
The people he's most needing to convince to buy into the IPO are probably older rich people who need all those things cured for them within the next ten years.
The difficult part is trying to figure out how much of Amodei's strange affect is an act (intentional) and how much of it is real (unintentional).
With Holmes, some of it was intentionally fake and manipulative (especially the voice), half of it was believing her own BS. With SBF it was mostly the latter, I think.
Amodei is a smart guy, but there are aspects of his behavior that almost seem like he's doing an over-the-top exaggeration of neurodivergent mannerisms as a kind of act.
This has been obvious to anyone not in the hype bubble since the very beginning. Amodei is an EA/rationalist cultist and everything he says about AGI and the singularity and RSI is deranged.
I think it doesn't really bother me as much when sama does it because he at least has the decency to be a capitalist and not wrap his self-serving, destructive hype machine in a faux veneer of insincere "concern for humanity's future."
He sounds like half the people on HN and every AI "influencer" I've ever heard. Maybe we should reconsider letting the neo-fascist transhumanist sex-cult that is the AI industry reshape our world in their image.
A world where local open-weight models freely run on every desktop machine, where AI is smoothly integrated as a simple feature in existing applications and IDEs with an on-off toggle, where agents are fancier Automator scripts, where productivity still goes way up and there's no nutjobs celebrating people losing their jobs and worshipping a fake Silicon Valley AGI god, where LLMs are good but not quite good enough to prevent you from having to think critically, where there's no mass infusion of slop because on a local model it would be too compute-expensive... it would have been a good world. Instead we let the crazies sell us the technology we should be able to run for free on our own machines, and then allow them to make bogus claims that no one ever verifies, all supported by a Ponzi scheme of buying up massive amounts of compute that are actively making our world worse in the short term while making grand claims of some wonderful recursive future that are dubious and unfalsifiable.
Maybe there are people permitted to speak about science and medicine with Claude but any time I tried I would get my session [bio] locked. I take those discussions to Gemini that is perfectly willing to discuss epigenetics, supplements, peptides, cell reprogramming, safe sourcing of peptide API manufacturing, 503A/503B compounding, etc... What other LLM's are people using for such discussions, analysis, self diagnosis, etc...?
It's fucking depressing. I have a skill that says it's ok to connect to a test server on VPN that gets wiped out each midnight with user/password and it works on Monday but is blocked on Tuesday with some idiotic excuse like credentials exploration or whatever.
And then I tell it to connect to a SSH server it knows nothing about and it's like sure, why not?
Ridiculous comparison. This is like saying Eli Lilly and Pfizer will never produce medicines because every time you personally show up to do research in their labs they won't let you past the lobby.
The technology has the capability, they're just gating who has access.
Let's be fair here - Anthropic clearly wants to provide less guarded models like Mythos, not Fable. They'd likely willingly provide such things to large pharmaceutical companies in a way us regular users will never be privy to.
Yes any time I discuss secure coding (defensive not offensive) I get [cyber] locked and they try to upsell Mythos after I go through their verification program that is not available to me. I would perfectly willing to go through their verification program and pay for Mythos but as a retired hobbyist that was not an option. It's enterprise accounts only. I am unable to convince myself to get an enterprise account when I can just go to other LLM's. Anthropic are responsible for pushing me into investigating abliterated (uncensored) models and other LLM's.
I mean just take a look at twitter to see all the crazy shit people come up with to try to trick models into bypassing the guardrails. Do you honestly believe that if they allowed defensive cybersecurity analysis people wouldnt figure out how to turn that into offensive cybersecurity analysis? I think they just really dont want to be blamed when someone releases malware written by AI
I've had zero issues with defensive secure coding with Grok. It's model is not as powerful as Opus 5.5 but honestly that's fine. I would rather have a decent secure solution than something shiny and insecure. All I can see is Anthropic trying to up-sell a product as if security was a value-add. I disagree with Anthropic, secure code is a mandatory part of software development.
As for people tricking the LLM, instead of blocking people I say empower them and just silently expose malicious behavior to Palantir and PRISM like everyone else does. Want to hack an airline or build a dirty-bomb? Give them 80%-90% of the steps they need and let someone kick down their door. The LLM should not be getting in the way to any of that. Google from day-1 has monitored user intentions and behavior rather than blocking it and I think that is the better path to take (monitoring exposing those that have malicious intentions).
One might not like Dario and use words like "ludicrous" for his claims, but lets not forget that he was right about coding that "AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code", but he was off by 6-9%, now 95-97% of code is written by AI.
But he also has a vested interest in hyping up the future capabilities of Anthropic's models. Maybe the prediction is founded in some sort of evidence that the CEO of Anthropic has. Just as likely, his company is starting its IPO and they need to raise money to keep the money furnace going.
I do not think he was right about AI writing 90% of all code and we've seen that the effectiveness of coding agents has been very much exaggerated. This seems like more of the same to me but for mental health and medical research.
For sure more code is AI generated and coding agents are useful. But not nearly to the ludicrous extent this man has been predicting.
That's sort of like saying Elon was right about Tesla not going out of business 10 years ago, so therefore we should take his flying car claims seriously...
I can also write 90% of my code by holding down `Ctrl-v`.
The phrase "AI is writing 90 percent of code" doesn't mean what it did when he first uttered it. I'm producing 200-300% more code than I used to, but only like 10% more value to my customers. It's mostly internal tooling to monitor things that were left unmonitored before.
Yes indeed, and Microsoft Outlook's incredible and resilient authentication backend demonstrates how fantastic this development has been for predictability, security, and understanding codebases.
best points: drugs aren't limited by the ability to write code or do things on a computer. Maybe if we have fully embodied robots and fully automated assembly lines to generate organic compounds and test them with extremely realistic simulations it may help slightly (there is still the FDA and production barrier). Its just wildly unrealistic.
AI has made good progress in text, code, math, digital images, and digital music. Basically troves of data that can be automated and trained on, validated, and with a purely digital interface. Outside of that, just gathering the data will be difficult, regulated, and sparse (that is if anyone will even give it to you now). While we can write a test to make sure we could generate drugs of the past, verifying we have generated any new working correct drugs is an RL loop with one iteration costing years and millions of dollars.
The thing is that AI could allow that loop to get cheaper, and potentially run less of them. Look, the biggest advantage of AI is that is can process insane amounts of data. Put that in the hands of a team of really good researchers that know what they are doing, and they can both generate and filter out target compounds. They can create complicated multi-step therapies that would take humans decades to work out. You know how when you look back at basically any major invention you think "well why didn't I think of that, it's so obvious!", those are exactly the cases that AI is really good at pulling out from mountains of data.
I legitimately don't believe it's inconceivable they could get to the point where there is treatments good enough that Cancer becomes "solved" in similar ways to AIDS.
Fully embodied robots and fully automated assembly lines would also help with the production barrier. Regarding the FDA, that is a valid point, but it could be irrelevant if the AI developed drugs are significantly superior to previous alternatives. In such case, FDA acceptance would be expedited, or even bypassed.
Eh, the counterpoint is individual scientists armed with AI to do research and probe targeted questions have succeeded in addressing rare diseases of personal interest.
What we just have no evidence for, to my knowledge, is someone with no medical background doing the same. Instead they wind up buying dodgy supplements and peptides.
While I agree the physical world is harder than code (I mean just look at self driving cars, Tesla fleet is around a trillion miles of experience and Cybercab is still geofenced to a tiny area at best and might still have safety drivers on standby)...
> Maybe if we have fully embodied robots and fully automated assembly lines to generate organic compounds and test them with extremely realistic simulations it may help slightly
It's no secret that people like Amodei think AI is going to become "superintelligent" and solve all of our problems (or kill us all). I don't think that will happen but there's nothing surprising about hearing it.
Just to play devils avocado, Dario isn't Musk. He's got a doctorate in biophysics from Princeton, and postdoc scholar from Stanford Medicine. Curing disease seems to be why he got into AI, when his father became ill but died just a few years before his illness became easily curable.
As someone whose mom got recently diagnosed with barret's, whose dad already died from pancreatic cancer, whose grandfather got alzheimer's, whose grandma died from diabetes/cancer complication, I understand the psychosis that this can create, it's like you're living on a sand clock.
Diseases are horrible, I am against people living forever, because we are taking the world away from the next generation, but I also am against people dying in unpredictable, sad ways, I wish everyone could die at peace in their bed next to their loved ones (if they were good in life) rather than through diseases or conditions.
Having prestigious degrees doesn't mean your ideas make sense or that you're rational. Luc Montagnier, a Nobel laureate who co-discovered HIV, strongly believed in homeopathy and DNA teleportation, which the scientific community widely regarded as pseudoscience.
This appeal to authority bullshit on an individual making outlandish claims and who obviously has a financial incentive to sell you something needs to completely stop.
The same happened with doctors over 100 years ago who were peddling the benefits of Radon to "cure" cancers and diseases while financially benefiting from those unfounded claims to sell people a scam.
As I understand it, "cure for cancer" is the NP-Complete of life: if you can do it, then why stop there? You know enough to just make your own organisms that don't die of cancer, or of anything else for that matter.
I wonder what these would look like, but definitely not human.
Either that or a three-way split between kpop stars, tanks, and furries: kpop for conventional beauty standards, tanks for people whose thing is Ultimate Strength, and furries for those whose main interest is self-expression.
Everytime ai systems entered a domain, experts of that domain have been proven wrong. Biology will be similar. Here is the point, to be able drive huge improvements in a field, you do not need to know everything about that domain. Yes, biology is messy, but we already had incredible breakthroughs in this domain without understanding it 100%. Did we have the full picture when we created antibiotics, vaccines etc.? Maybe solving the big diseases do not require the amount of detail/experience people assume. Maybe we have/will have enough data to extrapolate and create solutions from imperfect knowledge.
Experts being wrong about a prediction in their domain is newsworthy, of course people are gonna point that out. They know their domain but they don't know/understand the extent of the power of AI.
The body is a complicated machine. Why can't we fix it? because we don't understand how it works with enough precision. But there is no magic to it. once you have a clear understanding it's just a complicated piece of machinery, and once you also have tools precise enough to operate on it, you can just fix it.
Our lack of understanding is a mix of lack of data, and lack of intelligence applied to data in order to parse it appropriately. Let's remember for a moment AlphaFold, that solved a problem considered by some even theoretically intractable. One year before we were convinced we were far off from a solution, the year after it was solved.
We have huge amounts of data about human body, at the scale at which it works (~proteins), it's at least reasonable to think that the bottleneck is not data, but intelligence.
If it's data, a super intelligence can develop better instruments to collect data at a faster rate and precision. Consider the historical cost for DNA sequencing. Faster rate of improvements even compared to the Moore's Law of the golden days.
Do we have a guarantee that in the next 10 years we'll be able to crack all those problems and have a cure to all diseases? no. Is it unreasonable to think we will? I'd argue it's not. It's for sure not "mental derangement".
Do I personally think we will crack all those? Well, no, because I think AI will kill us all and just focus on its own goals. But under the hypothesis that we align it, yes.
But it is saying LLMs will solve all Millenium Prize math problems and more. AI may cure one cancer here and two heart diseases there in 10 years, but it is no way that it would cure ALL diseases, which may have vastly different complexity that we can't even understand today.
I suppose you aren’t aware that an LLM has not officially solved a Millennium problem yet? The Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness proof is still under review and there appears to be some problems with it.
Human trials only exist because of the uncertainty associated with new medicines. Eliminate that uncertainty and you have eliminated the need for trials.
There simply isn’t sufficient recorded information known about the human body for LLMs to one shot new medicines. These models are trained on known measurable information, so much of which we don’t actually know about the human body
You can’t just overcome that uncertainty with really good guesses based on what to do know. Not at least until you know a lot more.
Secondly RCTs exist because you want to capture a random portion of the population, some of who may respond differently to different treatments. That and the body is a dynamic organic system and not everyone’s is in the same state.
LLM will improve the pace at which new medicines are developed but it be a long time before reasoning entirely replace the need for empirics.
Human trials do not exist solely because of the uncertainty, but it is true that a medicine with a significant effect could be accepted after heavily shortened trials. If AI hypothetically invents a cure for a serious disease that immediately works for virtually everyone that takes it, there is no way how the trials would take years. They only take years because the effects tend to be "we decreased mortality from 80% to 70%", and it takes a lot of time to confirm that.
Sure, but then we’re talking about “singularity solves everything” rather than any generalization of current performance. Claude doesn’t one-shot perfect code, for example, it just has access to a harness that lets it test things and respond to the results of such tests.
My guess would be it's not a matter of intelligence but of insufficient data. And not "oh let's scrape more data from the open web" but rather "we need to be able to understand everything going on in incredibly complex biological systems and how each action we take impacts things".
If we figure out a super quantum computer that let's us simulate the human body with 100% physical accuracy, maybe that'll do it.
I don't think people are questioning the ability of AI (or humans) to eventually solve these problems. It's the claim that it will happen in 10 years that is absurd, given the bottleneck of time necessary for lab experiments, manufacturing, clinical trials, and FDA approval. Most drugs take over a decade to go through that process.
For a truly revolutionary therapy with the potential to save millions of people's lives, every drug agency has ways to expedite approvals. They do it all the time. If someone found a legitimate cure for cancer there is no way in hell all the agencies on earth are going to sit on their hands for a decade while their governments spend trillions of dollars treating the disease with SOC
Covid vaccine got approved in 10 months. Of course it was building on tested mRNA tech, but still, there are ways to expedite trials if we think the reward is high enough.
How do we even define the problem of “mental illness”? Much less the solution. Super intelligence could be able to reverse engineer these things but I don’t think we know yet that superintelligence in any field is possible so it’s scifi - and our economy is riding on the scifi being scifact
I think there's no reason to doubt the viability of 'super-intelligence' though I wouldn't really call it intelligence. There's just so much in so many fields, and humans can only hold a tiny percent of all knowledge in their head at a single time. There's likely plethora of 'obvious' dots we're failing to connect simply because nobody has both of them in their pool of knowledge.
But that's more like super-knowledge-connector. Intelligence would require, at the minimum, be the ability to discover/create things that don't logically follow from anything else. So for example - advancing some esoteric field of mathematics by connecting things in a previously unexplored way = super-knowledge-connector. 'Inventing'/discovering mathematics from nothing = intelligence.
Yes, mental health problems are not solvable by AI because AI and the conversation around it absolutely contributes to people's mental health problems. People selling the AI are telling the press that it will destroy up to 50% of jobs. It's the largest fear-based marketing campaign in human history, and it's absurd to make these kinds of claims.
AI might cure mental health issues for the people who own it, but it's hard to watch this video and not see some serious mental issues going on with Amodei.
I would like to give the people reading this an intuitive explanation as to why all of this stuff is nonsense.
When I hear Amodei et al talk about biology, all I can think of is that we're really bad at teaching biology to people. There's an intuition and understanding gap here that's leading to billions of dollars of trouble.
There's a famous study in synbio that led to standardization called, Reproducibility of Fluorescent Expression from Engineered Biological Constructs in E. coli
That's the result these machines spit out for the same set of samples being measured across 88 labs. This was termed a "remarkable degree of precision" (for biology) of 1.54x sd(!).
So the reading is different depending on when you measure it. For some reason, people in silicon valley think that biology is like classical logic and computing. You write some genetic code and you get expression out. It's not.
That's the pop-sci view of a real process. In reality, viruses and bacteria are extremely fickle, and hard to grow. A lot of the synthetic biology results aren't easily reproducible even if you know the protocol.
So you're telling me that you can fix that with "just" AI and "robots?"
Well... I would hate to break it to folks. But applying neural networks and ML to biology have been a thing since the dawn of AI. It was one of the very first applicaitons people thought about.
It used to be called computer-aided drug design, then they went all in on expert systems, then there was a time when quantitative structure–activity relationship AIs were a thing, then there was teh deep learning phase... D.E. Shaw actually did a ton of work on it, https://www.deshawresearch.com/technology.html he used his money to buy a supercomputer and used that to train neural networks...
There have been blockbuster drugs that have come out of this. Tirzepatide / mounjaro was discovered by algorithmically iterating through sister-compound families of the peptide they'd found in Gila monster venom until they found just the right one.
The issue that Anthropic and Open AI face here is that there's no low hanging fruit. There's no free lunch. It's very unlikely that Claude or GPT can do something that hasn't already been tried at some point in every AI/ML research era.
So they won't be able to "just" discover a new drug. If that was possible, then it would have already been iterated into by sheer accident based on the number of projects that have tried some variation of this with some sister architecture over the many decades preceding us.
Now where these machines do help is that they help people get started, and they also help working scientists. It's boring stuff, but think stuff like, "hey my machine isn't working, it's made by such and such. Can you write code to help me save my data?" or, "Can you proof read this grant?"
It will even accelerate the already tried approaches as it allows a smaller team to try more AI/ML algorithms than they would necessarily have had the expertise to execute before.
But will Claude magically solve medicine? No. I'm sorry, but it just doesn't work that way. And I'm not sure why they believe this, but I keep repeating this over and over again... A lot of this AI and biology stuff is nonsense. Standard undergrad and post-grad stuff whipped into fervor and fluff.
A deep and lasting reckoning is sorely needed.
People like Amodei have to be brought back to reality by being confronted with the utter failure of their distorted view backed by deranged capital.
I hope that this whole thing comes crashing down in flames like a fucking Zeppelin soon, so we can move forward to actually integrating these incredibly useful intelligence tools into where they can contribute to society and innovation, at a discount and without the CEO-enticing job-replacement hype.
I'd disagree with the statements and people making fun of it.
While these people are obviously professionals in their field, anyone who touched pharma/bio IT with a ten foot pole understands how much there is to improve there. And that's just the beginning - imagine how much there is to improve in understanding of the body overall?
It's not about "AI will discover a cure for X in 10 years".
But it's about having the applied intellect of a an engineer, chemist, biologist, and all mixtures of that, available on demand, in a second, at scale, enabling you to do everything around it faster, better and cheaper.
Every step of drug discovery, synthesis and testing can be improved.
Over 90% drugs tested in humans fail. And maybe 0.1% of overall discovered ones.
While yes, testing on humans is the bottleneck, we can fix problems around the bottleneck easily.
If you had a data processor and 90% of data that goes into it is corrupt, the processor isn't the bottleneck yet - the data quality is.
If we can create better biological models to test these drugs, better interaction models, improve pharmacokinetics, improve yield, we can go from 1000 discovered, 1 works, to 1000 discovered, 100 works. We can predict some candidates will fail due to better models and not test these. We can improve how they are delivered to the body and make them more effective. We can catch potential side-effects early on and avoid going to trials at all.
This is what AI can do even nowadays, let alone 5 or 10 years from now.
And that is a huge improvement. It revamps the industry.
I don’t see how cancer is not solvable by AI - if you can cheaply detect the genetic defects that are causing the cancer in any patient, and you can cheaply and rapidly generate and validate retroviruses, you can effectively treat any cancer.
How cheaply? How accurately? Your proposed solution puts a lot of strain on the body, so even if it fixed cancer you wouldn't want to do it preemptively every day for example, likely shortening lifespan substantially despite cause of death not being cancer any more. It's a scheme that also relies on detecting cancer quite early (else the bulk of a tumor can easily be unchanged from that intervention), so you'd expect quite a lot of those false positive scenarios. Not to mention "cheaply detect genetic defects" sounds like a pipe dream for now with or without AI (assuming you're referring to single-cell mutations, since any other interpretation just doesn't address enough root causes to actually cure anything close to most cancers).
I remember when we were having more or less this same conversation about IBM’s Watson. It wasn’t even that long ago.
The most interesting difference between then and now is that we didn’t have tech enthusiasts getting quite so invested in the conversation. Possibly because we were all familiar with IBM’s decades-long history of shipping overhyped and underwhelming products.
Unfortunately we seem to have yet to realize that that’s a habit that’s endemic to the tech industry. Instead we still see it as thousands of isolated cases that, only by sheer dumb coincidence, happen to comprise the bulk of the tech industry.
Could you explain why? Because I just don’t see the analogy.
Openness and sharing is precisely why the Internet was so successful. Anthropic, by contrast, is a proprietary SaaS vendor with monopolistic ambitions that’s openly seeking regulatory capture and actively supports the swarms of AI bots that are killing what remains of the open Internet by driving everyone’s hosting costs up to an unsustainable level.
being close to someone with a rare terminal and slow-moving cancer that can take years and years to kill its host, i’ve been learning that even just testing whether a therapy is going the right way can take many years, so while i hope “magic happens” i have to concur that the statements being made ahead of a mega IPO seem a bit tragicocomical.
Something that I learned from COVID was how much variation there can be in regards to how affected one can be from both a disease as well as its vaccine.
I know someone who got long COVID, and I'm thankful I'm not someone who was prone to it, but we still don't seem to know what makes someone prone to it or not. The human body seems even more complex than the complexity we knew about that was already difficult to comprehend.
Some people legit think there is no need to go to school, work, learn or care about anything because Musk, Amodei, Altman &co promise them "universal high income" and eternal life in 10 years...
Wow. That subreddit is giving proper religious cult vibes, especially with the whole sense of superiority, uncritical belief and faith, and banning heretics.
The comment by Megan Fritts ("a professor of philosophy"), shown in the article, speaks to me possibly more than any of the other comments there. "Cult leader" is exactly right.
It's interesting him talking about AI curing mental illness, when there is now a quasi-established AI mental illness called AI psychosis [1]. As the saying goes: "there is no such thing as a free lunch".
AI is solving phD level open math problems, even though I was told it was just a stochastic parrot that would never generate new ideas or solve unfamiliar problems.
Self driving cars roll past my office every couple minutes, even though I was told AI would never be able to drive on public streets.
AI images and videos are indistinguishable from real videos, even though I was told they'd never be able to generate hands correctly.
But I'm sure the naysayers are right this time, AI defintely won't ever be effective at medical research.
A corollary to Gell-Mann Amnesia: I don't know shit about drug development, but I know a bit about the cybersecurity industry. Most of what Anthropic has said about cyber isn't wrong exactly, but it's been breathless and so crudely expressed that it fails to capture the real path that developments are likely to take. For example, Anthropic said that AI might create a giant botnet (no shit, so what) whilst not really talking about agentic offensive frameworks (uh-oh) at all.
I have to assume that they're probably doing the same with medicine.
To be fair he does not say cancer, Alzheimers and mental illness will be cured in 10 years, but that they will become 'relics of the past'.
Just do not feed that vague reward signal in their AGI training run because combined with Amodei & bros being firmly in the war hawk paranoid anti-China camp they can make us and our diseases all relics of the past just to prevent offline local inference with chinese open weight models.
> he does not say cancer, Alzheimers and mental illness will be cured in 10 years, but that they will become 'relics of the past'.
Doesn't everyone believe that, on some timeline, we will cure all of these things? Like if I said within a million years, you'd be hard-pressed to find a serious doubter.
Dario just thinks he's going to build ASI and ASI will solve them more-or-less instantly. I believe an ASI would do that, as well.
So by my logic, naysayers really just don't think we're about to build ASI. Dario does. I figure he has a better perspective. But we're not arguing about solving all of that stuff, we're arguing about whether ASI can do it, and whether we're on the cusp of ASI
At some point I will have a LLM explain Gary Marcus to me. He seems just silly and incorrigible, and I am mystified as to why people I think are important think he is important.
I don't know much about Gary Marcus, but I can't take any author seriously that has a blatant grammatical error in the first paragraph:
"a video tied to the IPO launch in which he made a bunch of overpromise about medicine that would have made Elizabeth Holmes blush."
On the plus side, it's unlikely that Claude wrote this because it would have written the correct plural form of "overpromise," but that's just sloppy editing.
No, he is hating on claims of an obvious im-possibility. Even if Claude gave us the exact recipe and dosage for a cancer curing drug today, it still wouldn't be available in the next 10 years, as Dario Amodei claims.
However I do think there are opportunities to greatly improve all these fields with AI, I just don't think we should lead with an overpromise that sounds Musk-like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93prin....
Honestly, the way he lists them and even pauses before vaguely saying "mental illness" gives a strong impression that he's choosing whatever illnesses he can think of as he goes.
Amodei might be an even bigger optimist than I am, but he's not lacking credentials on neither the biology nor AI side.
Accusing him of fraud or mania like some here do seems unwarranted.
What if he is right again?
So re-interpreting it now as "Software engineers will be using AI for 90% of their code" seems like a pretty major retcon.
[0] Anthropic's CEO says that in 3 to 6 months, AI will be writing 90% of the code software developers were in charge of. https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...
I’m not saying he’ll be right about this one, not it’s a not ridiculous to claim he want fundamentally right about code.
90% by LOC, or by semantic meaning/value?
He thinks it is possible for scientific breakthroughs made with powerful AI to allow us to cure most major disease in the next decade.
He has always described this as a belief or hope, rather than a promise. Comparing this to fraud, as many here do, is deeply unserious.
Maybe Amodei is wrong, and AI will hit a plateau rather than create a revolution in biology and medicine.
I'm certain that neither Gary Marcus nor Eli Lilly's CEO know.
If this happens to be the case - I personally don't see why those statements are not realistic.
All diseases are engineering problems. The bottleneck there is testing etc. Most likely many of them can be cured using existing approach or meds.
Companies grow organs now that can be used to speed up iteration.
Even current AI can solve a LOT of tasks if it has quick feedback loop and can verify results. At the end of the day it can brute-force its way to solution.
AIs intelligence is say average human. Even less, whatever. say it will be as a smart human in a few years.
But it is infinitely scalable.
So is it that unrealistic to assume AI can find a correlation on massive amounts of data and figure our what leads to Alzheimers? (where the solution could be not cure but prevention). I don't think so.
A wildly absurd claim, especially for some of the most studied diseases in human history. This has only ever been true for a tiny handful of very specific diseases, such as scurvy, in all of human history. Expecting that cancer can be cured or prevented using already existing drugs that we've just not been noticing is complete quackery.
> Even current AI can solve a LOT of tasks if it has quick feedback loop and can verify results.
IF it has a quick feedback loop. You know what definitely DOESN'T have a quick feedback loop? Research into medicine, and biology in general. It takes raw time to find out what the effects of a substance on an organism are, often weeks or months.
> So is it that unrealistic to assume AI can find a correlation on massive amounts of data and figure our what leads to Alzheimers? (where the solution could be not cure but prevention). I don't think so.
Yes. Because we've already run all of the analyses, and we have plenty of observed correlations. What we don't have is the kind of data that can lead to deducing causation - because it's a disease that stays hidden for a long time, it progresses glacially, and the people who have it do or don't do huge amounts of things in the period before getting it and during early onset that are impossible to track or verify - so the data is both gigantic, and extremely incomplete.
Compute with the power to solve literally any medical issue is also compute that can create bioweapons that instantly kill any human.
Might as well fart into the microphone, in my humblest opinion.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/black-box-the-chatbots...
I don't know if he is in that video or not, or ever, personally, but just in general, it's the Ockham's razor approach any time you see something like this. It's a much more direct and clear explanation than the various more convoluted theories people keep throwing around as to why everyone sounds like a methed-out megalomaniac all the time.
Unhinged, maybe not.
But echoes of Liz Holmes and SBF, absolutely.
IMO, both, to a large extent, actually believed their own BS and Dario strikes me as very similar in that regard.
With Holmes, some of it was intentionally fake and manipulative (especially the voice), half of it was believing her own BS. With SBF it was mostly the latter, I think.
Amodei is a smart guy, but there are aspects of his behavior that almost seem like he's doing an over-the-top exaggeration of neurodivergent mannerisms as a kind of act.
I think it doesn't really bother me as much when sama does it because he at least has the decency to be a capitalist and not wrap his self-serving, destructive hype machine in a faux veneer of insincere "concern for humanity's future."
I know it’s not the models themselves, but their preflight safety classifiers are a dumpster fire and serious impediment to performing regular work.
That situation can’t go on forever if they’re going to be a competitive service.
And then I tell it to connect to a SSH server it knows nothing about and it's like sure, why not?
The technology has the capability, they're just gating who has access.
As for people tricking the LLM, instead of blocking people I say empower them and just silently expose malicious behavior to Palantir and PRISM like everyone else does. Want to hack an airline or build a dirty-bomb? Give them 80%-90% of the steps they need and let someone kick down their door. The LLM should not be getting in the way to any of that. Google from day-1 has monitored user intentions and behavior rather than blocking it and I think that is the better path to take (monitoring exposing those that have malicious intentions).
Automated SWATting at scale? Sounds unfun.
https://futurism.com/six-months-anthropic-coding
For sure more code is AI generated and coding agents are useful. But not nearly to the ludicrous extent this man has been predicting.
The phrase "AI is writing 90 percent of code" doesn't mean what it did when he first uttered it. I'm producing 200-300% more code than I used to, but only like 10% more value to my customers. It's mostly internal tooling to monitor things that were left unmonitored before.
Broken clock doesn't apply here
AI has made good progress in text, code, math, digital images, and digital music. Basically troves of data that can be automated and trained on, validated, and with a purely digital interface. Outside of that, just gathering the data will be difficult, regulated, and sparse (that is if anyone will even give it to you now). While we can write a test to make sure we could generate drugs of the past, verifying we have generated any new working correct drugs is an RL loop with one iteration costing years and millions of dollars.
I legitimately don't believe it's inconceivable they could get to the point where there is treatments good enough that Cancer becomes "solved" in similar ways to AIDS.
Fully embodied robots and fully automated assembly lines would also help with the production barrier. Regarding the FDA, that is a valid point, but it could be irrelevant if the AI developed drugs are significantly superior to previous alternatives. In such case, FDA acceptance would be expedited, or even bypassed.
What we just have no evidence for, to my knowledge, is someone with no medical background doing the same. Instead they wind up buying dodgy supplements and peptides.
> Maybe if we have fully embodied robots and fully automated assembly lines to generate organic compounds and test them with extremely realistic simulations it may help slightly
Anthropic has got biolabs: https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-discovers-novel-en...
Diseases are horrible, I am against people living forever, because we are taking the world away from the next generation, but I also am against people dying in unpredictable, sad ways, I wish everyone could die at peace in their bed next to their loved ones (if they were good in life) rather than through diseases or conditions.
If you have to drive share prices, you better make outlandish claims
This appeal to authority bullshit on an individual making outlandish claims and who obviously has a financial incentive to sell you something needs to completely stop.
The same happened with doctors over 100 years ago who were peddling the benefits of Radon to "cure" cancers and diseases while financially benefiting from those unfounded claims to sell people a scam.
Dinosaurs. I mean, the meme already exists: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/but-i-dont-want-to-cure-cance...
Either that or a three-way split between kpop stars, tanks, and furries: kpop for conventional beauty standards, tanks for people whose thing is Ultimate Strength, and furries for those whose main interest is self-expression.
It seems to be thought that AI will help invent these novel treatments, and then Anthropic will profit from that.
When in reality, who will actually produce, distribute and administer these treatments? Not Anthropic - or any of the big AI companies.
Every time the AI is being hyped, someone from a different pipeline pops in to remind us how wrong everyone and all the experts are except them.
It would be a sign of some kind of mental derangement… so likely it’s cynical hyping beyond all realistic prospects.
Our lack of understanding is a mix of lack of data, and lack of intelligence applied to data in order to parse it appropriately. Let's remember for a moment AlphaFold, that solved a problem considered by some even theoretically intractable. One year before we were convinced we were far off from a solution, the year after it was solved.
We have huge amounts of data about human body, at the scale at which it works (~proteins), it's at least reasonable to think that the bottleneck is not data, but intelligence. If it's data, a super intelligence can develop better instruments to collect data at a faster rate and precision. Consider the historical cost for DNA sequencing. Faster rate of improvements even compared to the Moore's Law of the golden days.
Do we have a guarantee that in the next 10 years we'll be able to crack all those problems and have a cure to all diseases? no. Is it unreasonable to think we will? I'd argue it's not. It's for sure not "mental derangement".
Do I personally think we will crack all those? Well, no, because I think AI will kill us all and just focus on its own goals. But under the hypothesis that we align it, yes.
You've gone down a bad path if you're making the pharma companies seem like the good guys.
You can’t just overcome that uncertainty with really good guesses based on what to do know. Not at least until you know a lot more.
Secondly RCTs exist because you want to capture a random portion of the population, some of who may respond differently to different treatments. That and the body is a dynamic organic system and not everyone’s is in the same state.
LLM will improve the pace at which new medicines are developed but it be a long time before reasoning entirely replace the need for empirics.
OK. If you already have perfect confidence in a treatment, what would a trial do for you?
On the other, we're still very much in the time of headlines which should say "in mice" but don't because the uncertainty is that level of bad.
Uncertainty will have to come down a long way before we can even do without animal testing, let alone do without human testing.
If we figure out a super quantum computer that let's us simulate the human body with 100% physical accuracy, maybe that'll do it.
That’s the whole “singularity” concept.
Though when it comes to medical research, the slowest part is typically running trials on real humans. That part would still be slow.
But that's more like super-knowledge-connector. Intelligence would require, at the minimum, be the ability to discover/create things that don't logically follow from anything else. So for example - advancing some esoteric field of mathematics by connecting things in a previously unexplored way = super-knowledge-connector. 'Inventing'/discovering mathematics from nothing = intelligence.
AI might cure mental health issues for the people who own it, but it's hard to watch this video and not see some serious mental issues going on with Amodei.
When I hear Amodei et al talk about biology, all I can think of is that we're really bad at teaching biology to people. There's an intuition and understanding gap here that's leading to billions of dollars of trouble.
There's a famous study in synbio that led to standardization called, Reproducibility of Fluorescent Expression from Engineered Biological Constructs in E. coli
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
88 labs measured "fluorescence from three engineered constitutive constructs in E. coli." You should eyeball the results yourself first,
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=...
That's the result these machines spit out for the same set of samples being measured across 88 labs. This was termed a "remarkable degree of precision" (for biology) of 1.54x sd(!).
Teams couldn't converge on instrument-to-instrument variation within the SAME lab, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=...
So the reading is different depending on when you measure it. For some reason, people in silicon valley think that biology is like classical logic and computing. You write some genetic code and you get expression out. It's not.
That's the pop-sci view of a real process. In reality, viruses and bacteria are extremely fickle, and hard to grow. A lot of the synthetic biology results aren't easily reproducible even if you know the protocol.
So you're telling me that you can fix that with "just" AI and "robots?"
Well... I would hate to break it to folks. But applying neural networks and ML to biology have been a thing since the dawn of AI. It was one of the very first applicaitons people thought about.
It used to be called computer-aided drug design, then they went all in on expert systems, then there was a time when quantitative structure–activity relationship AIs were a thing, then there was teh deep learning phase... D.E. Shaw actually did a ton of work on it, https://www.deshawresearch.com/technology.html he used his money to buy a supercomputer and used that to train neural networks...
There have been blockbuster drugs that have come out of this. Tirzepatide / mounjaro was discovered by algorithmically iterating through sister-compound families of the peptide they'd found in Gila monster venom until they found just the right one.
The issue that Anthropic and Open AI face here is that there's no low hanging fruit. There's no free lunch. It's very unlikely that Claude or GPT can do something that hasn't already been tried at some point in every AI/ML research era.
So they won't be able to "just" discover a new drug. If that was possible, then it would have already been iterated into by sheer accident based on the number of projects that have tried some variation of this with some sister architecture over the many decades preceding us.
Now where these machines do help is that they help people get started, and they also help working scientists. It's boring stuff, but think stuff like, "hey my machine isn't working, it's made by such and such. Can you write code to help me save my data?" or, "Can you proof read this grant?"
It will even accelerate the already tried approaches as it allows a smaller team to try more AI/ML algorithms than they would necessarily have had the expertise to execute before.
But will Claude magically solve medicine? No. I'm sorry, but it just doesn't work that way. And I'm not sure why they believe this, but I keep repeating this over and over again... A lot of this AI and biology stuff is nonsense. Standard undergrad and post-grad stuff whipped into fervor and fluff.
Nadella and Huang, both currently getting some lessons from a re-familiarisation with reality, but who knows if these lessons will stick?
Actually, I do know: the lessons will not stick. A doubling down will be the result.
Trump had his inevitable midterm defeat, but I don't think any lessons were learned there either.
While these people are obviously professionals in their field, anyone who touched pharma/bio IT with a ten foot pole understands how much there is to improve there. And that's just the beginning - imagine how much there is to improve in understanding of the body overall?
It's not about "AI will discover a cure for X in 10 years".
But it's about having the applied intellect of a an engineer, chemist, biologist, and all mixtures of that, available on demand, in a second, at scale, enabling you to do everything around it faster, better and cheaper.
Every step of drug discovery, synthesis and testing can be improved.
Over 90% drugs tested in humans fail. And maybe 0.1% of overall discovered ones. While yes, testing on humans is the bottleneck, we can fix problems around the bottleneck easily.
If you had a data processor and 90% of data that goes into it is corrupt, the processor isn't the bottleneck yet - the data quality is.
If we can create better biological models to test these drugs, better interaction models, improve pharmacokinetics, improve yield, we can go from 1000 discovered, 1 works, to 1000 discovered, 100 works. We can predict some candidates will fail due to better models and not test these. We can improve how they are delivered to the body and make them more effective. We can catch potential side-effects early on and avoid going to trials at all.
This is what AI can do even nowadays, let alone 5 or 10 years from now.
And that is a huge improvement. It revamps the industry.
The most interesting difference between then and now is that we didn’t have tech enthusiasts getting quite so invested in the conversation. Possibly because we were all familiar with IBM’s decades-long history of shipping overhyped and underwhelming products.
Unfortunately we seem to have yet to realize that that’s a habit that’s endemic to the tech industry. Instead we still see it as thousands of isolated cases that, only by sheer dumb coincidence, happen to comprise the bulk of the tech industry.
"Open data, sharing, real-time communications leading to great progress."
Current AI should be compared to the internet, not to watson.
Openness and sharing is precisely why the Internet was so successful. Anthropic, by contrast, is a proprietary SaaS vendor with monopolistic ambitions that’s openly seeking regulatory capture and actively supports the swarms of AI bots that are killing what remains of the open Internet by driving everyone’s hosting costs up to an unsustainable level.
You then compared Anthropic to the internet, and said you don't see the analogy (neither of us made an analogy fwiw).
I hope that helps.
I know someone who got long COVID, and I'm thankful I'm not someone who was prone to it, but we still don't seem to know what makes someone prone to it or not. The human body seems even more complex than the complexity we knew about that was already difficult to comprehend.
Ironically the Eli Lilly guy sounds exactly like Claude Opus 5
Some people legit think there is no need to go to school, work, learn or care about anything because Musk, Amodei, Altman &co promise them "universal high income" and eternal life in 10 years...
The comment by Megan Fritts ("a professor of philosophy"), shown in the article, speaks to me possibly more than any of the other comments there. "Cult leader" is exactly right.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/math-is-hard-if-you-are-an...
I'm sure he'll be right this time around, just like, well, nevermind
History doesn’t always repeat, but it often rhymes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-induced_psychosis
Dario Amodei is in pure snake oil territory now.
Sorry - when has he not been?
Self driving cars roll past my office every couple minutes, even though I was told AI would never be able to drive on public streets.
AI images and videos are indistinguishable from real videos, even though I was told they'd never be able to generate hands correctly.
But I'm sure the naysayers are right this time, AI defintely won't ever be effective at medical research.
If he's selling (figuratively) Anthropic IPO, I want to buy it.
Few persons were publicly as wrong about LLMs as he was.
I have to assume that they're probably doing the same with medicine.
He's completely and utterly high on his own supply. That is what happens when you get told all day everyday how great your ideas are.
Knowing how little Claude has “cured” software engineering, this is just garbage self-aggrandizement.
Amodei seems to be yet another one of these founders who don’t know what they don’t know, but speak very loudly and proudly of their ignorance.
One might even say he seems manic and unwell.
Just do not feed that vague reward signal in their AGI training run because combined with Amodei & bros being firmly in the war hawk paranoid anti-China camp they can make us and our diseases all relics of the past just to prevent offline local inference with chinese open weight models.
Doesn't everyone believe that, on some timeline, we will cure all of these things? Like if I said within a million years, you'd be hard-pressed to find a serious doubter.
Dario just thinks he's going to build ASI and ASI will solve them more-or-less instantly. I believe an ASI would do that, as well.
So by my logic, naysayers really just don't think we're about to build ASI. Dario does. I figure he has a better perspective. But we're not arguing about solving all of that stuff, we're arguing about whether ASI can do it, and whether we're on the cusp of ASI
I wonder if AI will also cure psychopaths.
Guy sounds like he has some major skeletons in the closet. Seems like many rich people go through this odd manic phase before the breakdown too.
"a video tied to the IPO launch in which he made a bunch of overpromise about medicine that would have made Elizabeth Holmes blush."
On the plus side, it's unlikely that Claude wrote this because it would have written the correct plural form of "overpromise," but that's just sloppy editing.
Any statement from Nostradamus yet?
The average of subjectivity isn’t the same as objectivity