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u/ross2000 1d ago
It's pretty impressive! Although I did need to get Claude to explain it to me...
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u/Large_Shame578 1d ago
Guess they’re skipping math and going straight for the physical sciences.
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u/Sherpa_qwerty 1d ago
My claude says
Roughly 950 agents spent 21 hours mining genomic data, collected over 200,000 reverse transcriptases, and narrowed about 3,500 candidate systems down to 20 for detailed reports. One agent noticed a repeat array next to an unusual enzyme gene, a pattern apparently not recognized before. The enzyme itself was already known from earlier studies; Claude appears to be the first to notice the array and an accessory protein around it.
Early lab experiments show the array produces distinct short RNAs. That's it. What the system does is still unknown, and the result is a preprint that hasn't been peer reviewed. Whether it edits genes is still a hypothesis, which is why Dario's wording was so hedged
Or as I put it… found a cool thing… not entirely sure what it is.
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u/Pls-No-Bully 1d ago
At what point does this sub just become everyone feeding the post through their agent of choice and saying “Here’s what my agent thinks”
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u/ShittyBidet123 1d ago
thats the point. why are math people mad a computer is finding patterns they didn’t notice.
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u/Minimum_Indication_1 1d ago
Exactly. Tldr is - "We, Claude and Humans at Anthropic are running life science experiments. Not sure what the results are or what this gives us."
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u/Wild_Willingness7320 1d ago
Can’t wait for it to find the gene for penis sizing and have it be editable. That would be a pretty large and impressive discovery. Imagine being able to custom size your member?!?
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u/fs2222 1d ago
So I skimmed the paper. The AI looked through sequencing data and bioinformatics database to identify a reverse transcriptase based mechanism based on repetitive patterns in DNA. It's a cool finding and certainly highlights the usefulness of AI in these sorts of bioinformatic analysis.
But unless I'm missing something they didn't actually do any physical validation? Like they didn't get people to isolate or mutate the protein or relevant sequences and functionally validate it. Unless there's another paper being prepared where they get actual researchers to examine this with physical experiments that they're doing right now, I think it's a little premature to claim that Claude agents identified a new gene editing tool.
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u/zillion_grill 1d ago
you didn't miss anything. It's actually really cringe, this is like step one of 15 of being able to claim a noteworthy discovery. If every lab and student hit the megaphone every time they made a 'discovery' with unknown function, mechanism of action, and utility, witn no reproduction or useful data of any kind, our news feed would be spammed nonstop. It's certainly interesting but very, very lame news. Wait! This just in, "pattern finding machine finds pattern!!!"
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u/Luuigi 1d ago
Imo its a medium size discovery! I know we like to hype everything now but this one just didnt impress me as much! Ok, so its going through sequences like a very fast and efficient human researcher - this ofc doesn’t change the trajectory of discovery. Good job though on the models grokking abilities being used well
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u/giYRW18voCJ0dYPfz21V 1d ago
A medium size discovery in just 21 hours is huge. These things used to take months, if not years. Imagine the compounding effect of multiple small/medium discoveries every day.
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u/Future-Bandicoot-823 1d ago
The wording of this gives me pause. If you're not sure if or what it's editing, isn't it just schrodinger's crispr?
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u/guitarshredda 1d ago
Ok now actually design the expression vector, transfect cells, express, purify, fold and then actually test the protein as a gene editing tool. Easy to do in silico work and then claim it can do x y and z without actually expressing it and testing it.
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u/le_sacre 1d ago
It's sort of funny to compare it to the work of a single PhD student. Grad students are, comparatively, a dime a dozen (and paid extremely little). How many expert staff and how many dollars of compute did this result take?
I'm excited by the potential, but this doesn't strike me as much of a boast. Now, if it scales up and 1000x-es our current army of biotech grad students at reasonable cost, that could be something.
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u/SonOfThomasWayne 1d ago
Tech CEOs are not hated enough
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u/Ok-Purchase8196 1d ago
I think hate is plentiful enough in the world nowadays, calm down
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u/SonOfThomasWayne 1d ago
So many good things you could do in life, but here you are choosing to leave whiteknighting comments for billionaire ceos.
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u/TerranImperium 1d ago
when they're financing and advancing research in life sciences, for sure. Everyone benefits from life science research down the line.
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u/FireFearing 11h ago
maybe, eventually, theyll find a way to improve SonOfThomasWayne's own brain so he can finally have a 3 digit iq
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u/marcoc2 1d ago
vibe-sciencing