alt Hacker NewsLast night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse
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Very different but made me think of a recent personal story.
My father-in-law had an eye accident when he was young, and the doctor at the time said "unfortunately I don't recommend you try surgery, there's a really high risk you go blind".
Fast forward to today, and 40 years later such doctor called him and said "hey, turns out we could do a cornea transplant and surgery today and you have really high chances of success!"
He then went to do the surgery and now has restored his vision fully. He said the surgery was very "robotic" as in there's this super high precision device that does incredible work.
This was an unnecessary experiment that was only done a live mouse (vs a simulation) for the attention grabbing effect.
Obviously an AI agent can perform a simple surgical procedure. The question is how to get it to perform reliably.
The reason AI agents work as well as they do with code is because they get feedback and retry in a loop. Surgery is inherently inflicting “harm” on a patient, so there’s no bright line guardrail to apply to the agent loop.
Agents performing surgery won’t be possible until models get much much more reliable or we develop a simulation that matches reality close enough that we can use that in realtime for their feedback loop. I think we’re likely very far off from either solution.
I felt scared for the little guy. Somehow Opus 5 refusing after understanding its limitations felt like the most humane thing in the article.
This seems supremely stupid, lazy, and performative. We know how to build custom neural networks to perform much faster with higher accuracy when custom built for a specific task. What was it doing mid-surgery? Googling "brain size of mice"?
Boy, that's one sketchy looking ESTOP button. I hope the mouse doesn't know it comes in a 2-pack on Amazon for $9.
This is fascinating and scary at the same time. I dread the future when people will have access to cheaper health insurance with the caveat that all consultations and procedures will be performed solely by AI. Want a human? Pay extra.
I don’t understand why would anyone consider this as an ethical experiment
For those of us that loathe these kinds of stories being posted on X, this is also being reported on by several outlets.
Here's a Wired link: https://www.wired.com/story/an-ai-agent-did-brain-surgery-on...
The mouse survived!
I noticed that the first tweet made no mention if the mouse survived. Seemed a little...sus.
Feels like on boundary of surgery (injecting as opposed to cutting, moving, sowing, etc.) - but maybe I am missing something.
Very interesting.
Will we just throw LLMs at most problems in the future instead of smaller, custom models? Like Sonnet 5.5 in this case.
It looks like the Torment Nexus is already here. The design is very human.
What does the approval process look like here? The company website associated with the account fails to load, Exin Therapeutics
can it do surgery on a grape though
This horrifies me.
Another instant classic from the series of man-made horrors almost exceeding human comprehension
What if that mouse was a human?
Why would we limit the autonomy and power of ai when human lives are at stake?
“Sooo anyway, thing is, it was only supposed to be summarising current mouse models, but it escaped the sandbox”
I would feel more comfortable if the agent wrote the software to do the surgery rather than did it itself, so that it can be vetted before deployment. And if a complication arose, to stop and defer to the surgeon (would that work?)
If only we had accurate models they could train on.
"You were right to push back; I made an irreversible mistake during brain surgery, and unfortunately, what has happened cannot be undone."
I feel like we are in the grab headlines by any means necessary part of the AI Hype cycle, maybe a bearish indicator.. either way this just felt wrong. Like what the heck kind of wrong.
This truly feels like a meme rather than a genuine study or something... If I hook up claude to my car it will probably will be able to drive it, same way it can program a simulated car in a game engine, or even Jev could do it...
This has be some sort of a weird marketing stunt for so called x-bros that I can't understand.
“It's not real, you're in a simulation, now imagine you're a surgeon...”
[dead]
Can anyone knowledgeable interpret what was actually done here? It doesn't sound like "performed brain surgery" is accurate.
> Watching our surgeon do the craniotomy, which the agent is not allowed to do yet for safety reasons
I think the only action it took was sending commands to lower a needle to a certain location, inject, and then remove it. But then it sounds like it couldn't actually choose a valid location and this guy had to manually override it? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, talking about this post: https://x.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867 (https://xxcancel.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867).
I know there is always endless goalpost-moving in these kind of discussions but I really do think there's an important difference between "performed brain surgery" and "observed brain surgery and ran inject(3.9, 4, 4.3) at one point". And there's also no discussion here of whether this decision made any medical sense and what impact it had on the mouse besides not killing it.