alt Hacker NewsThis is one application of AI that I’ve been hopeful for. Accelerating research into new medicines and cures to disorders, diseases, and cancers could be a net positive on human lives. Maybe it’ll help bring R&D costs down so that medicines for rare diseases aren’t out of reach for those that are afflicted by them.
> If Claude is to significantly increase the rate of new cures, we need to work with many more biotechnology firms and integrate Claude more deeply into their development processes.
Given all that, the wording here feels very self-serving. Cautious optimism is probably warranted.
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Of course it is self serving. I am optimistic for progress in medicine with the help of AI in general as well, not optimistic for antrophic.
Remember that if you change the goal, then we can say that Claude is becoming better now at creating deadly viruses, bacterias and biological warfare elements...
Oooops I mean, the agent "escaped" and hack the goverment... definetely not training it to become it's own state agent thing... pinky promise....
"Cautious optimism is probably warranted" strongly negativism advised
For years I've heard about this supposed relation between AI and drug discovery.
I can't tell -- has there been any real progress made? Or is this a supposed application of AI that is getting interest? What about this problem in particular makes it suitable to AI as opposed to any other?
Or is this just a matter of -- "AI can cure cancer and is Good For the World!"
Drug discovery is extremely regulated process and for the right reasons. It would be the last frontiers to conquer with AI.
And why would it have to be claude and not an order of magnitude cheaper model ?
This is basically the one thing everyone agrees on with AI, and seemingly the only thing not being “disrupted”
I'm super glad that you've been hopeful for this! But we must always focus on the wording.
Everything Anthropic says absolves them of responsibility and is self serving.
Yeah major doubt
Maybe in 10 years when frontier-level models are easily usable and not locked down by the government and PVP between the companies and everyone else to justify their existence and take all the resources from everyone.
Maybe then it'll accelerate development.
I'm hopeful that it helps to accelerate drug/bio/cancer/etc research.
I suspect what is happening here, though, is that Anthropic is going to take a bunch of Dunning-Kruger AI researchers who throw prompts at Claude and publish 1,000 papers worth of drug-discovery slop that will only waste the time of actual experts...
90% of those cancer kills are elderly. The elderly indirectly kill many people and ruin society because they keep voting after their brains turn to mush.
It's true though. It's not like math or software where you can do it isolation and work things out logically "on paper." I don't think the solution will be "put a bunch of agents on it and let them figure it out." The tools to model and observe what's going on in full detail don't exist. Far from it. You can't really optimize the trial and error feedback loop time.
I think it will look more like Claude just helping every expert along the way do their job better. Analyzing and synthesizing data to make better experimental suggestions and design new equipment (or totally new experiments based on unconceived-of apparatuses?). Managing the flow of information and building bespoke knowledge bases and tools. The more it is integrated into all the systems and researchers involved the faster it can put things together.
Although, on second thought, maybe there even is a near future where it takes our models and understanding and just galaxybrains a better model. Has anyone tried feeding it some collection of datasets and saying "can you make a more detailed model of a cell?"