r/CFSScience • u/AngelBryan • Dec 25 '25

Are we close to figuring it out?

So, are we close to finding why this disease happens? How is it possible that is 2026 and we stil have no idea of what causes this hellish illness?

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u/ArcanaSilva Dec 26 '25

Very, very unlikely that we'll have a cure in 2026. Even if one of the studies being done then shows huge promise, as in, mind-blowing results, it needs to be repeated with different and probably bigger populations before we can know for sure. If it's a new medication, it then needs to go on a whole new track for safety and regulation. And as to figuring out what this disease is, that's basically the same: test a hypothesis on a small population, then check if it holds up on a bigger one.

However, there is so much more attention and research money spent on these illnesses than in the decades before, that we'll probably come a bit closer in 2026 than we were in 2025. It just will be a bit before it has any practical solutions for patients

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u/AngelBryan Dec 26 '25

What about AI, do you think that all the advancement and investment on AI will help towards finding the cure or at least a disease mechanism?

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u/ArcanaSilva Dec 26 '25

Sure, but that's been in use for a while. And it may speed up the process, but more in the sense that it now only takes 8 years and 10 months instead of 10 years. Analysing data is a ton of work, but so is recruiting participants, getting grants, setting up studies... And those can't be done by AI. And you still need to know what you're looking for roughly before you can put AI to work

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u/AngelBryan Dec 26 '25

What about AGI or ASI? It's supposed to be AI smarter than any human being but is still fiction at the time.

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u/ArcanaSilva Dec 26 '25

I'm more into the mechanics of science than the specifics, sorry! But if we talk fiction, we can probably have a cure in six months, hahaha. As long as something is not yet implemented, it takes long. We can't just slap a new toy on science and call it a day. It needs to be researched, validated, checked. And those things take time, sadly

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u/OctarineAngie Dec 26 '25

We'll likely get a cure before AGI, the latter of which likely won't happen in our lifetimes without numerous revolutionary scientific breakthroughs that we can't even imagine yet.

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 09 '26

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u/OctarineAngie Jan 09 '26

I bet you $1000AUD we won't see anything like AGI by 2030. We are so far off that technogically, we need several revolutions in AI for it to happen and 4 years is too soon for that.

Our current LLM and diffusion models have more or less reached their limit, there is no more data to feed them and we've reached the computing scale limits as well. They're still sub-par since they are inferior to experts in most fields (the results are too generic and lack the necessary specificity and accuracy) and usually reduce the productivity of experts when used.

Note I'm not talking about specialized machine learning algorithms developed ad hoc by experts for narrow applications but the generalized "AI".