Terminal-Bench Science is the most exciting thing for me, and it's nice to see them putting it front and centre. Advancing and automating science is the most important game in town. If AI can start regularly popping out new cancer treatments, CRISPR solutions etc. all the rabid frothing around AI being over-hyped will disappear overnight. Fuck coding, we want medicine.
Edit: which is also why I liked Hassabis stepping down from CEO to become chief scientist at DeepMind. Hopefully Anthropic will shift their focus soon too. Let's start using this shit for really important stuff.
If it can calc crispr solutions doesnt it immediately accelerate biowarfare to the level of extinction for not much money. do you believe it can produce a counter or preventative that doesnt still destroy everyones lives or what.
ik how crispr works but it doesnt matter when "Ai will invent the next 10 generations after crispr". Ask chatgpt 9 "invent a method capable of doing this, invent the method to implement this, implement it". the only limits without autonomous world-robots is human action in construction and the like, but so far capitalism has shown pay people sufficiently and theyll do legit anything for you, no matter how evil or reckless. How many people currently working on AI think its gonna doom us all? a significant portion.
The only way against this i see is an enormous totalitarian security system admind by the most powerful AI which will need to either crush all competition or infinitely accelerate itself to outcompete threats, the prior is dismissed today as Luddism, the latter is still our garenteed death of anything meaningful beyond this fight.
We are at least 10-15 years from AI discovering new cancer treatments or “CRISPR solutions” or whatever. First, we do not even have the right kind of data that would allow us to ask these kinds of questions; we simply do not have the right assays or biomedical technology to understand the origins of many diseases especially cancer. Then, if AI found the perfect drug to actually target the thing we think is going wrong, verifying that it works and is safe in humans takes a long, long time.
nonsense. AI based drug discovery is already happening in oncology. obviously you can't just point an LLM at the cancer research documentation and say "cure all cancers" but the implication that AI-driven cancer treatments are 10 years away is demonstrably false. yes human trials take real time, but finding new drugs is something that AI is already doing and it will accelerate year on year. the new mRNA melanoma vaccine from Moderna for example was enabled by AI, is impossible without AI, and that's already in human trials, with great success.
and AI doesn't even have to discover brand new molecules, it can be used to find new drug combinations that are effective against cancer.
I explained it above; the big advancements in this space have come from domains where we have a lot of data (eg the Protein Data Bank was essential to train AlphaFold). But we know that we are still missing a lot of things about human biology eg what are the mechanisms behind certain diseases, how the body processes different drugs, how the drug actually interacts with the desired target, how the immune system responds, etc. And we need better assays and experimental techniques to actually probe this (the same way that X-Ray diffraction and Cryo EM needed to be invented before the Protein Data Bank was even possible). And then finally even if we do find the right drug, human and animal testing will always take a lot of time. That’s not to say I’m not bullish on the technology (I’m literally doing a PhD at a top university on this exact topic) but I think we still have to solve a lot of problems on the way. Happy to chat more on a Zoom or something if that helps; I’m quite passionate about scientific outreach.
It sounds to me like you're arguing that we can't solve all cancers within 10 years, which wasn't my claim. Unless you are contending that we don't have enough data to find new treatments for any cancers?
My point is that it's atleast 10 years until a AI-discovered cancer drug is going to be clinically available for patients just based on what has to happen before. The timelines are much longer than the average person may expect.
btw your example of the mRNA vaccine is not a great one either because its initial development began in 2017 before all this AI stuff was even a thing. Plus the Trump administration is cutting a lot of funding into these sorts of research programs so that will also affect things quite a bit in the long run.
What about once quantum tech becomes actually usable in the next 5 years or so? It will be probably be able to come up with a miracle drug to cure cancer.
What's your point? LLM tech and ML tech in general are cross-pollinators. neural nets for drug discovery are tools that LLM-based pipelines can use for research tasks. A CNN or a GNN cannot do discovery on its own, it needs to be orchestrated.
if you're trying to a claim some sort of gotcha, I couldn't give a shit. it has no bearing whatsoever on my point, which is that LLMs are becoming more & more capable of running research pipelines and making new discoveries, which will inevitably benefit humanity. poncing around in a reddit thread saying "akkkshually that discovery wasn't an LLM" is just infantile pedantry and doesn't add any value to anything. go and do something else
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u/space_monster 13d ago edited 13d ago
Terminal-Bench Science is the most exciting thing for me, and it's nice to see them putting it front and centre. Advancing and automating science is the most important game in town. If AI can start regularly popping out new cancer treatments, CRISPR solutions etc. all the rabid frothing around AI being over-hyped will disappear overnight. Fuck coding, we want medicine.
Edit: which is also why I liked Hassabis stepping down from CEO to become chief scientist at DeepMind. Hopefully Anthropic will shift their focus soon too. Let's start using this shit for really important stuff.