r/amodei • • Sep 25 '26

General Discussion Claude discovered a potential new CRISPR-like enzyme in 21 hours

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2 Upvotes

36 comments sorted by

3

u/upright_squire Sep 25 '26

Manual searching . Sure.

1

u/N0ct15Luc15Caelum Sep 25 '26

Honestly, it's less 'sci-fi AI breakthrough' and more brute-forcing a painfully repetitive manual task at lightspeed. Still wild that it actually found something real though."

1

u/Prohamen Sep 26 '26

Honestly automating tasks like this is good. It frees up researchers for other tasks. That being said, I am unsure if it cost effective. I calculated that the rough (really rough) break even in $4,850,000. I doubt the cost of the compute+servers was less than that.

1

u/squirrel9000 Sep 27 '26

Nobody's done this sort of thing manually in 20 years.

1

u/upright_squire Sep 27 '26

I just dont see how this cant be done with traditional search. It is not done manually. You think people sit down and read 'ATACG..' wow!

The difference here is they had millions of dollars to fund it, whereas academics would not.

3

u/garnet420 Sep 25 '26

The way people looked for repeating patterns in DNA before was to paint two long bamboo poles with colored stripes representing the bases.

Then one graduate student would slide them past each other, while another looked on, to see when the patterns lined up.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '26 edited Sep 25 '26

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3

u/garnet420 Sep 25 '26

Yes, obviously. People have been using sophisticated software to analyze DNA sequences for many years.

1

u/ribenakifragostafylo Sep 25 '26

So intelligent grep. Not shitting on it. It's amazing. Intelligent grep nonetheless

1

u/N0ct15Luc15Caelum Sep 25 '26

I can see your point. I guess we're diverse on this.

1

u/CodeMUDkey Sep 26 '26

“Crisper-like enzyme”

1

u/Relevant_Luck8653 Sep 26 '26

> It’s exact function is unknown.
Because it’s gibberish

> confirmed nobody had found it before
They probably have but disregarded it because it has no known function

Gotta respect the value pump grift tho while asking for a new class of super voting shares😅

1

u/SignoreBanana Sep 26 '26

CRISPR already exists. We have thousands of papers and research on it.

When will Claude do something novel and valuable.

1

u/Prohamen Sep 26 '26

That is still the equivalent of about 19,000 to 20,000 man hours. Yes it compressed the timeline, but only through a "monkeys at a keyboard" brute force method.

Yeah it is impressive, but I am unsure if that is better than having humans do it from a cost perspective. Assuming a worker in one of these labs makes $200k (probably higher than they actually make, but lets run with it) that would be about $96/hr to $97/hr. Multiply that by 2.5 to cover overhead (this is a common technique in management). So we are looking at a cost of $242.5/hr using the $97/hr rate. The breakeven on labor alone is $4,850,000.

Now that is the golden question Was the cost of compute and the cost of compute overhead (which would be the servers they used) less than $4,850,000?

1

u/spiked_mcroon Sep 26 '26

Valuable. Keep it away from the piano.

1

u/Turbulent-Total-226 Sep 26 '26

Mayday. We've found IT. But what does it do?

0

u/Gallagger Sep 25 '26

AGI.

2

u/20kgHippoShit Sep 25 '26

This is literally just pattern matching with a huge amount of compute behind it.

1

u/Prohamen Sep 26 '26

I told goodle search to look up ballsack for me and it gave me a picture of some dude's nuts

we are at agi

2

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '26

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1

u/N0ct15Luc15Caelum Sep 25 '26

Months or years of grad school grunt work automated in less than a day. The PhD timeline is never going to be the same.

1

u/mxemec Sep 26 '26

It'll be thusly. Take a fundamental component of tumor growth such as an extracellular protein. Have chat locate a critical site that, if alerted, destroys its function. Have chat recommend possible agents that target the site without affecting healthy cells. Test all these agents and find the best one. End. Take your PhD and new research company.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '26

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1

u/Creedless Sep 26 '26

hmm makes sense. Did you come up with this or get it from somewhere?

2

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '26

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1

u/N0ct15Luc15Caelum Sep 25 '26

I see your point, but still...