It's no secret that people like Amodei think AI is going to become "superintelligent" and solve all of our problems (or kill us all). I don't think that will happen but there's nothing surprising about hearing it.
He honestly seems to be experiencing some level of mania, which I think a lot of people would if they were constantly in an environment that makes them believe they may have invented god. I do not think he's in his right mind. This is going to end up with a documentary about him, and not the good kind.
best points: drugs aren't limited by the ability to write code or do things on a computer. 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 (there is still the FDA and production barrier). Its just wildly unrealistic.
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.
Maybe there are people permitted to speak about science and medicine with Claude but any time I tried I would get my session [bio] locked. I take those discussions to Gemini that is perfectly willing to discuss epigenetics, supplements, peptides, cell reprogramming, safe sourcing of peptide API manufacturing, 503A/503B compounding, etc... What other LLM's are people using for such discussions and analysis?
Let's be fair here - Anthropic clearly wants to provide less guarded models like Mythos, not Fable. They'd likely willingly provide such things to large pharmaceutical companies in a way us regular users will never be privy to.
Everytime ai systems entered a domain, experts of that domain have been proven wrong. Biology will be similar. Here is the point, to be able drive huge improvements in a field, you do not need to know everything about that domain. Yes, biology is messy, but we already had incredible breakthroughs in this domain without understanding it 100%. Did we have the full picture when we created antibiotics, vaccines etc.? Maybe solving the big diseases do not require the amount of detail/experience people assume. Maybe we have/will have enough data to extrapolate and create solutions from imperfect knowledge.
I remember when we were having more or less this same conversation about IBM’s Watson. It wasn’t even that long ago.
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.
being close to someone with a rare terminal and slow-moving cancer that can take years and years to kill its host, i’ve been learning that even just testing whether a therapy is going the right way can take many years, so while i hope “magic happens” i have to concur that the statements being made ahead of a mega IPO seem a bit tragicocomical.
I don't know much about Gary Marcus, but I can't take any author seriously that has a blatant grammatical error in the first paragraph:
"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.
No, he is hating on claims of an obvious im-possibility. Even if Claude gave us the exact recipe and dosage for a cancer curing drug today, it still wouldn't be available in the next 10 years, as Dario Amodei claims.
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.
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.
It would be a sign of some kind of mental derangement… so likely it’s cynical hyping beyond all realistic prospects.
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.
"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.
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.
If he's selling (figuratively) Anthropic IPO, I want to buy it.
Few persons were publicly as wrong about LLMs as he was.
Dario Amodei is in pure snake oil territory now.
Sorry - when has he not been?
I wonder if AI will also cure psychopaths.
Any statement from Nostradamus yet?
The average of subjectivity isn’t the same as objectivity