Dario Amodei is in pure snake oil territory now.
Sorry - when has he not been?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 shortened, or even bypassed.
> 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...
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/black-box-the-chatbots...
If he's selling (figuratively) Anthropic IPO, I want to buy it.
Few persons were publicly as wrong about LLMs as he was.
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.
I wonder if AI will also cure psychopaths.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Nadella and Huang, both currently getting some lessons from a re-familiarisation with reality, but who knows if these lessons will stick?
Trump had his inevitable midterm defeat, but I don't think any lessons were learned there either.
If you have to drive share prices, you better make outlandish claims
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...
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.
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.
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.
Ironically the Eli Lilly guy sounds exactly like Claude Opus 5
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.
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
When I hear Amodei et al talk about biology, it's obvious to me that there's an intuition and understanding gap here. 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.
You've gone down a bad path if you're making the pharma companies seem like the good guys.
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 technology has the capability, they're just gating who has access.
I know it’s not the models themselves, but their 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.
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.
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.
This appeal to authority bullshit on a person that 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.
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.
903543958568•39m ago
Any statement from Nostradamus yet?
croes•34m ago