Guy in his basement creates a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease using AI

https://twitter.com/DouglasYaoDY/status/2070904914050797582

19•binyu•1h ago

Comments

mikelitoris•1h ago

How did LLMs not immediately shut down for “biosensitive” prompt or whatever bs they build into them nowadays?

DonsDiscountGas•1h ago

Opus doesn't do that (at least it never has to me). I'm pretty sure codex doesn't either. It's just Fable

binyu•1h ago

That behavior was only observed with the short lived Fable preview, Opus and other models do not seem to pose such limitation.

hhh•1h ago

They still have biology safeguards.

binyu•1h ago

Can you provide an example or a reproducible way to trigger it?

mikelitoris•42m ago

I feel like if you asked it how to make nerve gas or something that would trigger it. But don’t do that.

microgpt•1h ago

Because he only programmed robots to move A to B and didn't actually do any biology with AI

CPLX•1h ago

That does not seem to be an accurate description of what has happened here.

What it looks like is someone with significant biochemical experience and a Harvard PhD has created some kind of drug or chemical that he thinks will be effective for treating Alzheimer's, and that he mentions using Claude Code to help him program some of the complex chemical engineering machines that he used along the way.

microgpt•1h ago

Shush, you'll pop the bubble

ido•1h ago

Any subject matter experts care to chime in with your gut feeling about where this sits in the "promising potential treatment" to "AI psychosis" spectrum?

Avicebron•1h ago

It's closer right now to interesting hobby project from a guy who's trained in chemistry, like a guy who's a mechanic keeping a project car.

Maybe he publishes and it goes somewhere, I have a feeling getting approval for trials will be challenging with his setup as it is now.

I do like the "do chemistry the old fashion way" ethos though. I wish he added a blurb about why he's doing it this way

cucumber3732842•1h ago

>Maybe he publishes and it goes somewhere, I have a feeling getting approval for trials will be challenging with his setup as it is now.

Yeah, drug development is one of those things where practically the only way to make it to production is to let a big incumbent with a big enough war chest to drag it across the finish line buy it.

skeledrew•23m ago

If it isn't a potentially big money-maker said big incumbent won't touch it though. Will more likely try to shut it down especially if it overlaps with any of their more ludicrous offerings. And given the properties that this has (easy to manufacture, stable, soluble, low/no toxicity, etc) it's ripe for a shutdown because it'd make AD treatments far too cheap.

CoastalCoder•4m ago

Any reason he couldn't try advancing it somewhere like China or India, which (I assume) are less vulnerable to that kind of interference?

comboy•1h ago

Guy says he created a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease. Huge difference.

cristyansv•1h ago

> All of the in vitro screening was performed by an OpenTrons OT-2 liquid-handling robot programmed by Claude Code. Meanwhile, LLMs (mainly ChatGPT Pro) were deeply integrated into virtually every step of the discovery process - I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project without them

jorisw•1h ago

For those without Twitter accounts

https://xcancel.com/DouglasYaoDY/status/2070904914050797582

WarmWash•1h ago

Painfully editorialized headline.

He used AI to program robot arms.

throw310822•1h ago

"Meanwhile, LLMs (mainly ChatGPT Pro) were deeply integrated into virtually every step of the discovery process - I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project without them"

amelius•1h ago

What does the guy's basement have to do with it? We live in the internet age, we can do anything anywhere. Was there not any other more relevant information to fluff up the headline? By the way, why are we still using twitter?

jqpabc123•32m ago

With help of AI, i developed a universal cure for all disease --- strychnine.

However, it does seem to have a few undesirable side effects.

Still blazing after all these years: Mel Brooks at 100

LocalContextRouter – stop paying vision-token prices for text PDF pages

Show HN: QuicMic – Use your phone as a PC mic in the browser (Rust, QUIC)

Tech Morality Is Hard

Hestia – a local-first Home Assistant that trusts timers over the LLM

Scalpers List Steam Machine Reservations at $1,700

Autoregressive Boltzmann Generators

Give Me 14 Minutes and I'll Destroy Your Procrastination Forever

Austria Lobbies EU to Host Anthropic After US Access Curbs

My First Atari ST

Compete – A Claude Code plugin for interactive competitor intelligence

Google limits Meta's use of its Gemini AI models

China companies Z.Ai,China 360 claim having cybersec AI models to match Mythos

Pyrite64: N64 game-engine and editor using Libdragon and tiny3d

Pi is the wrong circle constant

A World Championship for a game that's been solved for since 1952

Ask HN: Impact on LLM development after the USA policy of preliminary vetting

Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

Show HN: Custom domain emails for open source projects (KaiMail)

Revenue at Risk from AI Displacement

Show HN: Nomina – Single Binary DNS and Nameserver with WebUI for Homelabs

The origins of the school system aimed to produce independent, critical thinkers

FizzBuzz in Smalltalk

These Are the Most Beautiful Equations, According to Mathematicians

Ask HN: When I Submit my project the comment option not show

Ask HN: You have one year to make $1M. What's your plan?

Pollen tried to remove my article, and Google is assisting to it

Show HN: O11y.jobs is a job board focused specifically on Observability

How VictoriaLogs Stores Your Logs in a Columnar Layout

The curious case of the disappearing Polish S