Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

Very cool! However, the amazing absence of results makes me question whether they've got a Nature letter forthcoming or whether they know that another AI lab has a similar finding...

In a year or two, articles like this will either be artifacts from peak hype or evidence of the beginning of the singularity. Right?

• BobbyJo · 13 hours ago

  Yes. I would bet on the latter.

• dude250711 · 13 hours ago

  That's black and white thinking; it will be a midgularity - so neither.

  • kikokikokiko · 13 hours ago

    Mehgularity

    • demritocracy · 13 hours ago

      Whompageddon

• pizza234 · 13 hours ago

  The singularity, as defined by Hinton (and others) as RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) may actually be beginning already, as OpenAI has announced an AI acting as a "research intern" (!).

  • physicallyIllfr · 13 hours ago

    How is it improving, that would require rearranging its weights and biases which it cannot do easily or quickly.

    • criddell · 13 hours ago

      Is easily and quickly a requirement? Isn't it enough that over time it improves itself even if the process is complex and slow?

      • nozzlegear · 12 hours ago

        Do we know it's actually improving itself? Perhaps it's just opaquely sorting all ones and zeros for better lookup efficiency.

    • pixl97 · 13 hours ago

      Self improvement during training, and AI self training are already happening. Easily/quickly are seemingly a factor of how much power/hardware you want to use at once. With the level of compute they have they aren't stuck with frozen models like you are.

      • physicallyIllfr · 4 hours ago

        The infrastructure provisioning alone to train is heavily dependent on humans, as is dealing with failures (training runs fail a ton). Its not as simple as adding another ec2 on your dashboard. < 1k people in the world know how to do this, there will not be "recursive" or looped continual training for a long long long time. There are so many delicate inputs and controls. Not to mention the chains of businesses and the people required to operate them just to obtain the data needed, clean it and hand it to the llms. The llms are supervising rlhf and creating synthetic data (to an extent) but they're nowhere close to being able to operate the full training stack end to end. This is a fantasy being sold to investors to create fomo. Remember they're also limited by an effective memory of like 500k words a turn. Memory systems are lossy, so are swarm/sub agent mechanism. Im not worried about llms becoming self powered super entities anytime soon.

  • jackb4040 · 12 hours ago

    How is this different from arguing that Microsoft Clippy was RSI? An AI tool being involved in the process of work can't be the bar for RSI. I don't think there can be a coherent definition of RSI unless people lay out their theory for how intelligence scales. LLM-assisted coding is great but respectfully optimizing pytorch features or whatever is not gonna lead to exponential improvements. That approach to scaling diminished years ago, leading all the labs to switch to reasoning. Now it seems reasoning is also yielding diminishing returns, so all the labs are pivoting to specializing in particular fields like math / infosec / biology. They're improving due to accessing new proprietary training data and doing RL with human experts. Again I don't really see any amount of "AI research interns" leading to an exponential improvement to this strategy, they're not the bottleneck in the first place.

    • pizza234 · 12 hours ago

      > Now it seems reasoning is also yielding diminishing returns Not true. On the contrary, LLMs are developing faster than predicted. They were expected to solve a Millennium Prize by 2030... and here we are in 2026. Release cycles are getting faster. Just compare the most recent GPT or Claude with what they were an year ago. > How is this different from arguing that Microsoft Clippy was RSI? We can argue about semantics, but that's not really the point. The point is that what started now - which no doubt is in its infancy - will result in full autonomy quite soon (they project an year or so), with the risk of RSI causing agent development to slip (long term) outside human cognitive control/capacity.

      • jackb4040 · 11 hours ago

        Again, can you lay out your theory for how intelligence scales? You're using a lot of terms like "full autonomy" without definitions. Why do you think that just throwing more harnessed LLMs at (something?) will lead to an increase rate of improvement? I feel like I laid out several cases where other things were the limiting factor on improvement and more agents wouldn't have helped, and I didn't get a response to those cases. What "they project" (the labs) is of minor interest to me. Aside from their incentives and track record of lying, in recent months they are laying out a story that is pretty much just the plot of Terminator, and directly referencing rationalist beliefs that were published long before LLMs even existed.

    • famouswaffles · 9 hours ago

      >Now it seems reasoning is also yielding diminishing returns Is the diminishing returns in the room with us? >so all the labs are pivoting to specializing in particular fields like math / infosec / biology. They're not pivoting to anything. The goal has always been creating a machine that could automate all or nearly all human work. They're just coming along on that mission. As for RSI...I think the term is a bit odd in the modern context. It was created at a time when conventional wisdom was that generally intelligent machines would be these logic automatons that could "alter their own code". Instead we have massive neural networks that take months to train. In this paradigm, the ways a LLM could "improve itself" would be altering its own weights directly or creating and training better, vastly more efficient architectures for the next generation of models. The former is probably not happening but the latter is possible.

      • jackb4040 · 9 hours ago

        Yes, diminishing returns. Not overall, they've still been able to create more intelligent models even up to today. But the strategy for scaling that intelligence has shifted. From the initial ChatGPT release to GPT-4.1, they were basically scaling up compute training compute / model size. Then 4.5 flopped, while o1 demonstrated that gains could continue by reasoning (scaling up compute at inference time). o1 is now the ancestor of all their flagship models from GPT-5 on. This is why I'm trying so hard to drill down on the theory of scaling, and not just talk about improvement in general, hand-wavy terms. If the bottleneck of current scaling strategies is training data, or something fundamental about the model architecture, then just throwing more harnessed chatbots at it won't lead to an exponential increase in performance. Now you could argue that the AI we have now will help us find that change in architecture, and I would agree. But that means we're firmly outside the singularity for the time being, and what people are in fact talking about is a hypothetical.

        • famouswaffles · 8 hours ago

          >Then 4.5 flopped, while o1 demonstrated that gains could continue by reasoning (scaling up compute at inference time). o1 is now the ancestor of all their flagship models from GPT-5 on. That's not quite right. They are still scaling model size and have had several new base pre-trains, just nothing so big as 4.5 (as far as we're aware). o1/4o has not been the base for some time now. Data is obviously a bottleneck for some regimes and LLMs will have to get their hands dirty experimenting but it doesn't look like an insurmountable wall either.

This is great, but I can't help but wonder if we're going to have another post next week with a lab complaining that they were about to publish this same finding, and they had Claude proofread their paper, and whoops how'd that get into Anthropic's training data?

• petcat · 13 hours ago

  Lots of stuff gets discovered by AI bots that was always hidden in plain sight. They're remarkably good at "connecting the dots".

  • pixl97 · 13 hours ago

    Being an effective pattern matcher and next word predictor is like 60%+ of intelligence, maybe more. The people that say "It's just a next word predictor" might as well be saying "Well, it's just a long rage nuclear missile".

• jjtheblunt · 13 hours ago

  the article says the reverse transcriptase had been noticed before, but apparently only Claude commented on the subsequence repeating, to your point.

• epistasis · 13 hours ago

  This is a very inaccurate manipulation of facts that fundamentally misrepresents everything that mathematicians wrote.

  • bananaflag · 13 hours ago

    Shouldnt this be "misrepresents"?

  • thorum · 13 hours ago

    In what way?

• monospacegames · 13 hours ago

  I wonder how long it will take for the damage Alpöge and Buckmaster have done to the perception of these AI-driven scientific developments to fade. Not saying that they were right or wrong, but that single moment sullied all AI-driven breakthroughs that came after it, and I don't think it was ever particularly relevant, at least not nearly to the degree that it was presented in the media. But I guess it ended up being a convenient outlet for AI anxiety in the end.

  • mullingitover · 13 hours ago

    I don't think of this stuff in terms of AI anxiety, I just think that the AI labs should be falling all over themselves to display deference and humility to those who made it possible. The LLMs that make this stuff possible weren't created by the AI labs from whole cloth. They crept up and jumped onto the shoulders of giants, basically the collected (non-consensually, of course, but jingles keys look at this pelican riding a bicycle!) works of humanity. Every discovery LLMs enumerate in this fashion rightfully needs to have a billboard-sized asterisk regarding the provenance of the discovery. "Claude" didn't discover this, everyone who worked to produce the internet that Anthropic siphoned into their dataset belongs on the credits. It's great that it happened, and I wish them the best of luck in using our work to make the world a better place. Just don't forget who the rightful owners are.

    • famouswaffles · 9 hours ago

      If Claude didn't do it then neither did any of the scientists credited on papers in the last...well ever. Everyone is standing on previous work.

  • techpression · 13 hours ago

    The AI labs did that to themselves. All those billions and their marketing and communication skills are like those of a local street vendor selling fake knockoffs.

This shows why biology is so much harder a problem area for LLMs than math, finding RTs is tedious but pretty doable today, they had to scope the problem down a lot from something that would be the equivalent of Navier Stokes in biology. Glad they’re doing it though, even if it’s just marketing.

• encyclopediai · 12 hours ago

  Every day now I expect that they or somebody alike will discover in our genes that we (ie life) are lambda terms, combinators or something similar to Universally Programmable Intelligent Matter https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~bmaclenn/UPIM/UPIM3.pdf or chemSKI https://imar.ro/~mbuliga/talks/chemski-with-tokens.html All it takes is to identify the syntax, so to say.

  • SirMadam · 11 hours ago

    This is something I like joking around about, with regard to how LLMs are 'decent' [debatable but taken as a premise] software engineers. For a long time people have said DNA/RNA/etc is the programming of life. If it is indeed HIGHLY analogous to programming, we would then expect LLMs/future systems to be HIGHLY proficient at accurate ex-vivo gene [or enzyme/protein] modification/construction

    • asdff · 9 hours ago

      It is akin to programming but more complicated. In this case, you can run the same code on different systems and get different results, and this is in fact an advantage of the language as a whole. Same DNA throughout your entire body yet you have distinct cellular identities thanks to this ability. But the hard part is really nothing is annotated or defined. We have annotated and defined some things but its tricky work and so much left to describe. Its like you have entered a house and have no idea what each room is for, or what the light switches do, or even what even is a light switch, or a room for that matter. Maybe you identify a repeated plastic switch through the building that seems to be nearby doorways, you call this the light switch. What does it do exactly? Have to flip it and hope you can detect what changed. Hopefully when you flip it the whole house doesn't just die in the womb, but actually limps along in some way where you can say "this switch controls the garage developing as an attached structure or detached in the back yard" Even more fun when the switch is just one piece of the circuit of a dozen plus switches that all have to flip a certain way in a certain order over a certain time for some function.

  • Simboo · 10 hours ago

    We are Cellular Automata

  • whtrbt · 5 hours ago

    You will probably find this paper by Hessameddin Akhlaghpour very interesting: [An RNA-based theory of natural universal computation]( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34979104/ ). And a [YouTube talk by the author]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=984vm12HUF0 ).

  • hardbass · 2 hours ago

    I have bookmarked the links to read later but until then I would ask in what sense? To my knowledge the known physics currently is all within the realms of a Turing machine, which is equivalent to lambda calculus.

    • Paracompact · 2 hours ago

      A model of lambda calculus with a much smaller Kolmogorov complexity, then.

    • encyclopediai · 58 minutes ago

      You can play with it. Equivalence with Turing machines is not the point of interest Sorry about this "not A but B", now is one of those situations where is needed. Is not: - cellular automata, - Turing machines implemented chemically. The goal, first of UPIM, then chemlambda or chemSKI, is simply to: - find chemical complexes, - or to make them (though I suspect that we shall discover them in our cells) so that they enter in random chemical reactions which are akin the graph rewriting inspired by lambda calculus or SKI combinators or Interaction Combinators. The thesis is that this chemical translation still can do "anything" despite the lack of control of reactions or the combinatorial explosion of possible reaction networks. Under this thesis we are graph quines.

• 6thbit · 12 hours ago

  It's really a matter of iterating on the problem and validation right? Models make progress on coding and math because they can write tests and proofs to an extent. Many industries that are more 'physical' and require performing experiments lack that instant feedback loop. Find a way to close that loop and AI begins to look useful. But try and convince companies to invest on closing that loop just to see if the current models work well on their problems or not? Tough sell. So Anthropic just shows them, hey look, this is possible and if you don't do it I will.. so they fold.

  • asdff · 9 hours ago

    >Models make progress on coding and math because they can write tests and proofs to an extent. Many industries that are more 'physical' and require performing experiments lack that instant feedback loop. This is basically what they targeted with this approach. They can't automate the experiments since they are often bespoke towards certain goals or even feelings and assumptions based on sage technician knowledge that isn't really taught in any one place. Instead, they tried to automate the process of searching for candidate targets to then test in downstream lab experiments. Seems exciting, but this sort of thing has been done for a while with just about every single ml classifier method out there for all sorts of biological data. Just yet another way to slice the pie.

• pishpash · 10 hours ago

  This shit can get highly dangerous, much more so than some datacenter hacking. Where did the doomsday fear go now?

• dwaltrip · 9 hours ago

  Biology is much harder than math for humans as well!

  • root_axis · 5 hours ago

    I don't think that's a given - not sure how you'd even quantify that comparison.

    • dwaltrip · 5 hours ago

      My argument is mostly about the complexity and the immensely intricate physicality of biology. We can barely inspect much of it, let alone fully understand it.

      • root_axis · 4 hours ago

        I think you could make a corresponding argument about the unbounded complexities of an abstract domain like mathematics. Math also has a notorious reputation for difficulty. We don't even have a way to know how much there is to know about math. I'm not sure I see one is clearly more difficult than the other.

    • esikich · 1 hour ago

      Given enough time, I think anyone with a proclivity towards math could derive the quadratic formula from first principles. I don't think there's anything in biology that can really be derived in that way. You'd have to start from the physics of chemistry or something. In which case you'd need quantum mechanics and... math!

LLMs are really good at discovering patterns on huge dataset. Google also had similair breakthrough discoveries they stopped marketing them

• aniceperson · 13 hours ago

  yes and no; you cant dump DNA in the context window and call it a day, in the blog post it was a common tool calling session. you do can have actual ml models for that, that the llm could use as a tool.

  • pixl97 · 13 hours ago

    I don't think you quite understand the loops here. At Google/OpenAI/Anthropic level you have clusters of LLM agents working with clusters of ML agents doing all kinds of tasks. A lot of this falls into proto-RSI where the LLM can improve the ML agents output based on analysis of said ML. This isn't much different from how people work, you can't dump even part of DNA context in a human mind and get anything useful out. We has humans have to use and build tools to find answers because of scaling efficiencies of different computation types.

Don't use it for biology, Dario said, as he turned humans into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.. I reckon that soon, he too will return to dimension X.

• hackeraccount · 13 hours ago

  I call Michelangelo!

• solenoid0937 · 5 hours ago

  I don't think they ever said "don't use it for biology", just "we won't let randoms on the internet use it for biology."

"Investigating the novel enzyme incident in our SF lab [2027]"

It's clear Dario believes that the solution to AI's PR problem is to cure cancer. Or invent other revolutionary medical treatments. They're going to heavily promote every step along the way no matter how small or far away from commercialization they are, like this one. No doubt that curing cancer would help, but I think the timeline might be a little too long. Even RSI AGI will not be able to get new medical treatments to market instantly. Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.

• jMyles · 13 hours ago

  > Even RSI will not be able to get new medical treatments to market instantly. Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process. Is it unavoidable, though?

  • jjk166 · 13 hours ago

    In the way that breathing is unavoidable. Like yeah technically there is a way to avoid doing it, but not a way that you want to seriously consider.

    • orangecat · 9 hours ago

      Operation Warp Speed showed that we can substantially accelerate the process if we care to.

• JoeOfTexas · 13 hours ago

  Cancer can be cured in a lot of cases, its just so damn expensive and the treatment is beyond torturous that some patients cannot handle it. Stem cells are amazing. But we need cheaper technology to replicate them into the cancer destroyers they need to be, as well as find ways to ease the pain of that internal battle.

  • Aboutplants · 13 hours ago

    Please tell me more about these “cures” you speak of. Because to my knowledge, yes we are good at getting patients into remission, we do not have “cures” Coupled with the fact that treatment is often life altering in and of itself

    • toomuchtodo · 13 hours ago

      CAR T-cell therapies (immunotherapy, tldr priming the immune system to respond) https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t... https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/immunoth... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cell https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/10/cancer-treat... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

      • D-Machine · 34 minutes ago

        CAR-T is not a cure in any sense of the word, in part because "cure" is just not a scientifically valid concept in oncology. I would know, CAR-T saved my life, but this was at great cost and is not even remotely close to a guarantee, and the side-effects can be beyond devastating https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827669 . At best, CAR-T is more like a tradeoff: often just a coin-flip's chance to live, for long-term—maybe even permanent—life-shattering consequences.

    • victorbjorklund · 13 hours ago

      Semantics. Cancer is uncontrolled growth of cells. Treating it is killing/removing the cancer cells. Problem of course is you are never sure if you got all of them. If you got all of them you are “cured”. If you didn’t you are not cured in case the remaining cells manage to grow and spread again. We don’t talk about “cure” because of course it is impossible to verify if 100% is gone or not.

      • jobs_throwaway · 13 hours ago

        Why is it 'of course impossible'? Couldn't we someday have nanobots or other tech that could screen all your cells and be able to indicate whether any cancerous cells remain?

        • SpicyLemonZest · 12 hours ago

          No. It's hard to get even small molecules where we want them in the body, there's no way that the gigantic molecular clusters called "nanobots" could reliably get access to every single cell. (What may be possible is using things like the Moderna cancer vaccine to make your body an inhospitable environment for the growth and multiplication of the cancer cells.)

        • smolder · 12 hours ago

          If we were able to find cancer cells with a precision down to 1 cell, killing them would be trivial. There are lots of cells in a person. It's possible we will get there someday. I think bioengineering is the most likely route. I.e., design a virus to specifically target the type of cancer cell you mean to eradicate.

        • dekhn · 12 hours ago

          Strictly speaking, no impossible from our understanding of physics, but also an enormous scientific and engineering problem. research into that would take away from people working on more reasonable approaches today.

        • asdff · 9 hours ago

          We already have these nanobots in our bodies. This is the entire rub with cancer. There is amazingly strong selective pressure to evolve ways to hide from our existing nanobots and make them think these are valid healthy cells. Artificial nanobots would be no different in this respect. As for why our nanobots aren't already perfect, it's hard to get perfect. In fact it can go the wrong way, some people's nanobots end up too aggressive and start attacking their healthy cells (autoimmune disorders).

      • D-Machine · 35 minutes ago

        Correct. The people here saying CAR-T is a cure have no clue at all what they are talking about, and I say this as someone that is only alive right now because of CAR-T https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827669

    • sourcinnamon · 13 hours ago

      In addition to the other comment mentioning CAR-T therapies, we also have therapies based on tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2024... https://jitc.bmj.com/content/8/2/e000848 (careful: Figure 1 can be very graphical, but it shows the huge positive impact of this therapy) We also have therapies based on monoclonal recombinant antibodies conjugated with chemotherapeutics. Simply put, we can produce antibodies that are specific for markers present in the surface of cancer cells, and we can attach drugs that can kill those cells. The antibody part is what makes this type of therapy very effective (you target only cancer cells, and not healthy cells) and also very expensive.

      • D-Machine · 36 minutes ago

        There is no world in which CAR-T is a "cure", especially since this isn't even a scientific term in oncology. We generally say if there is no relapse after 5 years post-treatment, then any cancer is a "new" cancer, so 5 years of remission is the closest thing to a "cure", but this isn't a scientific term. Also, we barely have more than 3 years data for CAR-T for most cancers. And even still, the survival rates aren't great, in many cases 50% compared to e.g. ~20% for previous chemo-immunotherapies plus marrow transplants. And this ignores how massively immunocompromised (or so permanently brain-damaged you are effectively senile) CAR-T can leave you. You can be severely immunocompromised (literally identical to or worse than AIDS / late-stage HIV) for at least a year in close to half of cases, but maybe even permanently, in perhaps as high as 10% of cases (at least for lymphomas). I say this as a person that is only alive because of CAR-T treatment 1.5 years ago. CAR-T is amazing, and a far better treatment than previous treatments, but calling it a "cure" is deeply misleading and mostly clueless. Currently, it is simply a much better last-ditch effort than the previous ones.

    • ransom1538 · 13 hours ago

      Burn (radiation). Cut. Poison (chemo). Your picks for cancer. IMHO Eat less. Remove all sugar and vitamins. Go a week without food. Give your body time to kill the weak cancer cells before they grow exponentially.

    • Glyptodon · 13 hours ago

      I don't know about "cured" but I've been cancer free for something like ~27 years. With childhood cancers some of them have very high rates of "cure," but it is true that the impact of the treatments (at that time at least) follows you for life in various ways. The more modern immunotherapies and such seem potentially much better than chemo if they can be turned into successful and consistent approaches.

• boothby · 13 hours ago

  > Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process. Not if it's a virus

  • SwellJoe · 13 hours ago

    Nothing like releasing poorly tested viruses on the public to really earn trust.

    • boothby · 2 hours ago

      I don't expect such a release to be deliberate on the part of the humans. Just, hooking bots up to wet labs and having coffee while the world burns.

• baq · 13 hours ago

  Dario would like to ‘cure’ aging. He’s got some personal experience with bad illnesses, but aging isn’t that. I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.

  • rafaelero · 13 hours ago

    > I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids. How so?

    • pooloo · 13 hours ago

      Not OP, but wanting eternal life without leaving a legacy just sounds like someone trying to be a god and is very narcissistic behavior

      • jobs_throwaway · 13 hours ago

        Or they just enjoy life and want to keep living? What about it is 'trying to be a god'?

        • freejazz · 12 hours ago

          The never dying part...

          • keeda · 12 hours ago

            "Gods are immortal" does not imply "immortals are god" though. Like the movies showed us, you could always just cut off their heads. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

      • rosslh · 13 hours ago

        Gods famously don't have legacies

      • hlynurd · 12 hours ago

        A lot of parents are literally trying to live forever in some way by leaving a legacy.

      • sebzim4500 · 11 hours ago

        Isn't wanting billions of other people to die infinitely more narcissistic than not wanting to die yourself?

  • SwellJoe · 13 hours ago

    > I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids. I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness. Edit: And, you're saying you want to die. Is that more trustworthy than not wanting to die? I suppose if you are religious, you might believe you're going somewhere good when you die, in which case, you don't actually believe death exists, so we're having different conversations. I believe death exists and is permanent, and I'd like to not do that.

    • hlynurd · 13 hours ago

      Yeah we gotta put me on that list too. This is a weirdly specific prejudice.

    • tripleee · 13 hours ago

      +1 what a weird bias

    • nxc18 · 13 hours ago

      Do you not want other people to die and be replaced?

      • GeoAtreides · 13 hours ago

        do these other people have a fertility rate of at least 2.1?

      • SwellJoe · 12 hours ago

        I don't have kids. I have not caused a need for me to die to make room or to be "replaced" (though "overpopulation" arguments are often eugenicist and/or racist propaganda, and don't engage with actual density/agricultural limits, so I'm hesitant to make any arguments based on whether there is room for people to not die).

      • throw310822 · 11 hours ago

        How can you want for other people what you don't want for yourself? Why should other people die, for example of cancer, when having the chance I'll opt for the cure?

        • nxc18 · 10 hours ago

          I don’t want to live longer than a natural human lifespan. When I was younger and immature I did, but I’ve outgrown that. Death is as natural a part of life as birth.

          • SwellJoe · 10 hours ago

            Perhaps I will mature enough to appreciate death if I'm given a few hundred, or a few thousand, years to think on it. For now, I stand firm in my conviction that death is bad in the general case.

          • throw310822 · 6 hours ago

            The question is not if you want to live longer. It's "when you'll get cancer, will you refuse the cure to get rid of it"? And when you'll be old and frail and full of aches, will you refuse medicines to make your mind sharper and your body stronger? And when you'll be a strong, healthy and sharp 95 yo, will you choose euthanasia because you've reached the natural human lifespan?

          • solenoid0937 · 5 hours ago

            This is just copium. On your deathbed, offered the chance to live another decade with the vitality of your 20s alongside your loved ones, you almost certainly would not say this unless you were actually just suicidal.

      • sebzim4500 · 11 hours ago

        Obviously not? What an insane question

        • nxc18 · 10 hours ago

          You would like Trump and Biden and their generation of leadership to be in power for the next 200 years? You would like for there to never be a disruptive new generation of people bringing fresh ideas and fresh thinking ever again? You wish to be encumbered by 17th century thinking and ideas for the rest of eternity because those people never died and grew set in their ways?

          • SwellJoe · 10 hours ago

            Do we really need 8 billion people to die to keep a few dozen out of power? Surely we can come up with some alternatives? Just spit balling, but I've heard of something called "term limits", which, as far as I know, does not require mass death.

          • sebzim4500 · 9 hours ago

            a) I don't want any of those things b) I don't understand why you think those things are necessary consequences of people living much longer c) Even if they were, I don't want 'fresh ideas' so much that I am willing to sacrifice billions of lives for them

    • bigfudge · 13 hours ago

      Not Op but there’s a inch of people asking why, and I have a similar feeling to op so here’s my post hoc justification for a weakly held and poorly supported prejudice: It’s really because statistically, in my experience people without kids are more selfish than those without. This is more in description than judgement, but it’s true in my experience. We can speculate as to reasons, but looking after kids does train a certain kind of selflessness. Agreed we might be doing it for ultimately selfish reasons (self presentational or for care in old age or whatever). But for a good chunk of the time, caring for kids seems to require the fairly consistent subjugation of personal preferences, and a degeee of perspective taking, that I just think people without kids don’t have. And that often shows in their interactions at work and in daily life. Obviously there are myriad exceptions. But it’s true enough in my experience. The wanting to live forever part also seems weird to me, and correlated with a certain sort of self regarding perspective. It seems obvious to me that I (or my generations) need to die for my children and grandchildren to have a good life. To try and subvert that also seems selfish or self important somehow. I’m not really arguing this is a correct or good or just position. It might be terrible! But it did resonate..

      • AbsurdCensor · 12 hours ago

        > It’s really because statistically, in my experience people without kids are more selfish than those without. That would certainly be your opinion. I think the ultimate selflessness in a world being more and more damaged by humans would to elect not to perpetuate the species, and help try to leave the world a better place for those who do choose to have kids.

        • anthonypasq · 12 hours ago

          very very bizarre ideology. Glad you arent having kids. thank you for your service.

        • mik1998 · 12 hours ago

          That's an absurdly selfish position. You're taking a stance that not existing is superior to living in the future, all the while living in the world yourself. Might as well advocate for nuclear genocide.

          • tuesdaynight · 12 hours ago

            Why selfish? They said that they want to leave the world a better place for other people children. Is there something that I didn't get as an ESL?

        • muspimerol · 12 hours ago

          The flaw in that ideology is that everyone relies on the next generation for care in their old age. Taking advantage of the future generation without contributing to raising it isn't selfless in the slightest. If you live in a developed country you probably already have a demographic crisis. Not having kids is hurting the next generation, not helping.

          • hlynurd · 11 hours ago

            It still baffles me that some have children to have someone around them when they're old

      • BeetleB · 12 hours ago

        > It’s really because statistically, in my experience people without kids are more selfish than those without. I've witnessed the opposite: Having kids made people much more selfish. Resources were plenty before they had kids, so they would spend a lot (time and money) on others - be it friends or the general public. When kids come along, two things happen: 1. Resources are limited, so a lot less goes outside the family. 2. At least one parent will put the foot down when being generous to people outside the family - even if the wealth/income supports being able to do so. Tribalism sets in.

        • phainopepla2 · 10 hours ago

          Selfishness is commonly understood as putting one's own interest above everyone else's to an excessive degree, not the interest of their family. If you redefine it to include family interests then I think everyone would agree that having a family makes people more selfish, often dramatically so. I just object to the redefinition.

          • BeetleB · 9 hours ago

            I think this "redefinition" is apt in the context of the conversation. It's about people mistrusting those without kids because they are viewed as selfish, and I'm pointing out that they're often the least selfish, and more likely to "help the world" in situations where they do not benefit.

            • bigfudge · 1 hour ago

              I can see your point, although in my experience it hasn’t actually worked that way. But even then, normalised for the amount of free time they have i think it’s unlikely to hold . Take a specific scenario: imagine a difficult outdoors adventure maybe cycling or walking, when the weather is bad and something has gone wrong (and any kids have been left at home). All else equal would you rather be stuck with a parent or a non parent?!

      • cannonpalms · 12 hours ago

        This aligns with my own experience to a T.

      • rtsil · 12 hours ago

        Paying full taxes to support a society where people with kids pay less taxes and receive more benefits from the State is certainly not selfish. That's the case in my country, at least.

        • charcircuit · 11 hours ago

          Money is not the only way one can contribute to one's society. Doubling the amount of productive people to society is also a big contribution. Even from a purely financial perspective you need to count all of the future taxes that will be collected from the family lineage instead of just from the one person who ended his lineage.

      • asdff · 11 hours ago

        >It’s really because statistically, in my experience Uhh, no. Your experience is not data.

      • sebzim4500 · 11 hours ago

        >in my experience people without kids are more selfish than those without This goes so far against my own (equally anecdotal) experience that one of us must be living in a bubble

      • orangecat · 9 hours ago

        The wanting to live forever part also seems weird to me Wanting to die after a handful of decades seems weird to me, especially if you're in good health. It seems obvious to me that I (or my generations) need to die for my children and grandchildren to have a good life That is very much not obvious.

        • bigfudge · 1 hour ago

          Boomer health and life expectancy is one of the issues western countries are struggling with now. Having GenZ pay for extended expensive retirements whilst simultaneously gouging them for artificially scare accommodation is the result. Now imagine everyone lives in perfect health forever. The incumbency effect for wealth and power is going to be overwhelming without pretty fundamental political and social change. Perhaps you think that is possible? I hope so, but the evidence from octogenarian US politics isn’t hopeful.

      • esikich · 9 hours ago

        I've long been thinking about making a browser addon to block HN users. You've inspired me to get this done tonight, thank you for the push, your comment is unhinged and I'd rather not ever have to read what you say about anything else.

        • krapp · 9 hours ago

          If you don't want to do the work look up "HN Comments Owl."

    • Glyptodon · 13 hours ago

      I think there's a nuance gap here. Many of us, if offered, would be happy to live for a a millennium or two if we'd stay at worst middle-aged. But there's a giant gap between being willing to take that offer if given, and a desire for it being a big personal motivating factor.

    • patcon · 12 hours ago

      > I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness. When I hear people say stuff like this, I hear that they want to remove the single most universal chesterton's fence in all of living systems. I hear them take pride in their/our hubris, and demonstrate willingness to put the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk because they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution. Biological singletons (outside very specific niche situations) are not meant to persist, and most anything that has tried, it has simply been selected out of the lineage. This constraint (which we don't understand yet) is presumably the whole reason why biology discovered and moved into the more ephemeral higher-order substrate of thought and culture. Just my feelings though. Feel free to disagree.

      • hlynurd · 12 hours ago

        > are not meant to Because it hasn't happened?

      • SwellJoe · 12 hours ago

        Chesterton's fence implies intention, a will, a decision to stand up the fence. I don't believe in gods, so my existence and its length were determined by a series of accidents. It isn't right or wrong or even optimal, it's just the traits that survived thus far. It isn't even a rule of biology. There are living things with much longer lifespans than humans, some even effectively immortal (absent predation or accident or climate change). Your language implies you believe in a creator of some sort, something making decisions about how things should be. You've called it "biology", but "biology" doesn't "discover" or have a "reason" for doing things. > I hear them take pride in their/our hubris, and demonstrate willingness to put the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk because they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution. I hear you taking pride in accepting death on a quite short timespan as a necessity, and hubris that one individual living longer puts "the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk". We have already disconnected from evolution, to a large degree. Many people who would have died in childhood a couple hundred years ago now survive to adulthood and procreation. Should we stop vaccinating children because they were supposed to die to protect the delicate balance? Surely it is hubris to prevent their deaths when evolution and biology discovered polio and smallpox to kill and maim them? If there is a biological Chesterton's fence it is probably sitting somewhere around five years old and half of people wouldn't make it past it.

        • howunfortunate · 11 hours ago

          > Chesterton's fence implies intention, a will, a decision to stand up the fence It most certainly does not.

          • SwellJoe · 11 hours ago

            How could it not? Chesterton's fence asks the question, "Why was it put there?" Without a will you can only answer "how was it put there" and not "why". There is an assumption of correctness in the argument that "we must die because we do die". It's tautology. That doesn't comport with my understanding of how we got here, and I don't believe there is an answer to "why" we are here, beyond the meaning we make of our own lives. If our 70-90 year lifespan (if we're lucky and aren't struck down younger) is an evolutionary accident, and I believe it is, then extending that lifespan is Good, Actually.

            • howunfortunate · 11 hours ago

              As one obvious example, evolution is not agentic but still answers "why" questions. "Why do we have a heart" "Why do we sweat", etc. But Chesterton's fence is often used in an even MORE generalized way than just that, not "why is it there" but "what are we not seeing about how this connects to everything else" As an example, eradicating mosquitos. We see many obvious reasons why it might be good, we can even see that they don't seem that important in the food chain, but it would be hubris to assume we understand every potential connection they have to world ecology.

              • SwellJoe · 10 hours ago

                By the time we've figured out how to live significantly longer, I reckon we'll understand "why" we don't. That's kind of a precursor in this case. But, I should be clear, I don't believe there's any reason to believe the answer is "because we're supposed to die". There is no "supposed to" in evolution, no right or wrong, no ethics, only survival. It is merely a series of improbable occurrences that led us to this point, and I see no reason to attribute moral intention to the result. Every argument for death, absent a religious decree, comes down to "because everyone who has ever lived has eventually died, usually painfully" so it must be correct because everyone does it, even though most of those folks would have rather not. And, the reason we don't is almost certainly mundane; we aren't needed after procreation, according to evolution. But, I think humans still have value after they have procreated.

              • SwellJoe · 7 hours ago

                Also, I'd take my chances with the mosquitoes, if we had a way to eradicate them without poisons that impacted other insects. Or, I would also accept a widely available, low-cost, cure for all mosquito-borne illnesses as an alternative.

      • orangecat · 9 hours ago

        they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution. "Thermodynamic evolution" says that sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice. Yes, I do think we're more clever than that.

        • patcon · 9 hours ago

          > sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice. That's not what I'm saying. Sick kids dying is not the same as old people living and holding social/economic/positional/etc capital into perpetuity. And further, what I'm saying is about "us" as a larger living system, at coarse-grain scale. We each live at fine-grained scale. Negotiating truths and values between those is the fuckin work of being alive. Bluntly, some might reasonably ask: who would reasonably prioritize your individual happiness and health if the cost on your society/culture means a trend toward collapse? That's not me saying "I don't care about you" (I do!) but it's me pointing out that there are fuzzy lines when negotiating values across scales. A thing that makes you happy (heck, that makes a majority happy) might conceivably invite some variant of the endtimes. Something good for the health of some parts can be bad for the health of the whole. Death is part of our thriving and a part of us ("us" in the Gaian sense) at the largest coarse-grain scale, though it hurts like hell at the fine-grain one

          • SwellJoe · 7 hours ago

            > who would reasonably prioritize your individual happiness and health if the cost on your society/culture means a trend toward collapse? What evidence do you have that people living longer would cause a trend toward collapse? What evidence do you have that people who live longer and without debilitating health problems wouldn't care more about the future of our planet and society and be able to achieve more toward improving it? You're accusing people who want to live longer of selfishly causing societal collapse acting as though you're taking a moral high road, preserving a precious thing, but you're arguing that 8 billion people alive today should die. That's a remarkable bit of ethical gymnastics and a monstrous position to take by my reckoning. I was kind of OK with it when I was thinking, "OK, religious people believe nobody ever really dies." Which I believe is a fairy story, but one that many people believe and are raised to believe. But, yours seems to be your own brand of religion, and it doesn't even pretend people actually never die and go to heaven but you want it to happen to everyone anyway, which is really something.

            • solenoid0937 · 5 hours ago

              There is no coherent reasoning with this crowd. I have had hundreds of discussions of this form. In the end, in every case: it's just rationalized copium about the fact that they will die. It is very easy for them to say "people should die" on an Internet forum. On their (or a family member's) deathbed, presented with a cure to death, they would say something very different. When push comes to shove, no one but the suicidal actually hold the belief that people should die. In my experience the pro-death crowd takes this stance because they don't dare to dream of a world in which death is cured - because you can't get hurt by the potential of a future you don't believe in.

              • patcon · 3 hours ago

                Ugh, I suppose I perhaps seem as insufferably myopic to you, as you do to me. Collapse is evident in that almost nothing survives being immortal except cancers and flatworms. You witness the evidence of this "collapse" all around you in that virtually nothing deigns to live forever and tell the tale (genetically speaking), and then you call me neglectful of some evidence? And as for your challenge, you don't know the conversations I've had with people I love. The politics of immortality are so challenging that I prefer not to write my sincere beliefs on the public internet. EDIT: I do appreciate the chance to engage with ppl so different from the sort I regularly speak with, and so am grateful for the words, even if it seems we are both a little frustrated by them. Which is to say, thanks

    • alasano · 12 hours ago

      The prejudice is based on billionaires being the first to get access to the cure for aging in these hypothetical scenarios. While everyone else can't afford it. Hard to think of a more demoralizing "off with their heads" dystopian scenario.

      • SwellJoe · 12 hours ago

        Well, sure, but there are solutions to those particular billionaires. We don't have any politicians I'm aware of that are willing to consider those solutions, but they exist. Societies, including the US (to some degree), have solved the problem of oligarchs in the past through various means. We can do it again, and should consider all the options.

      • notnullorvoid · 11 hours ago

        On a personal level it would be demoralizing to see some billionaires live multiple lifetimes, but only a tad more demoralizing than seeing the wealth disparity we already have and the changing line of idiot faces at the top.

      • optimalsolver · 11 hours ago

        Think of rich people as beta testers.

      • andriy_koval · 11 hours ago

        especially given how they fund their billions from 401k through rapid inclusion into indexes, building DCs near residential areas, stealing IP, regulatory capture and hype driving manipulations.

    • throw310822 · 11 hours ago

      Don't worry, all these people moralising on the importance of aging and dying will do their utmost to live longer and in better health whenever the time of the choice comes. No one will say "oh well I guess I'll just keep this illness because that's the natural course of things"- they will get the medicines and the surgery, the creams and the lotions, they'll jog and limit exposure to the sun and avoid smoking and drinking. Given the choice, unless incurably ill or in the depth of despair, they'll always choose life. At least for themselves.

  • nicman23 · 13 hours ago

    tbh we are trying to treat aging as a chronic illness and we probably will

  • onlyrealcuzzo · 13 hours ago

    > I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids. Why are you only allowed to live forever if you have kids? Seems like someone seeking immortality should be willing to do for the elixir if they want it even a little bit...

    • bagacrap · 5 hours ago

      People who have kids are less likely to want to live forever because they've realized that children are in fact how we live forever.

  • Varelion · 13 hours ago

    Why? Who in their right mind would have children in 2026? Everything is burning, gone to shit, and projected to get worse. Having children is insanely irresponsible.

    • jobs_throwaway · 13 hours ago

      HackerNews' neuroticism is unmatched Your dramatization of society's ills are not tethered to reality

      • Varelion · 12 hours ago

        It's not? Have your seen climate change forecast? Have you seen the cost of diesel? Eeosion of democracy in the US?

        • DeluluDon · 11 hours ago

          Have you lived long enough to see it go up and down?

          • kamyarg · 11 hours ago

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surface_temperature You can see this is not a cyclic issue. Or atleast not a cycle shorter than couple thousand years.

        • rafaelvasco · 11 hours ago

          Please. Every single age of humanity, there have been hardships. It was actually much worse before: Diseases galore, famine, pests, wars. You're severely negatively biased as is a lot of other people I've seen.

          • feoren · 10 hours ago

            I don't care how hard it was to live in Abyssinia. This is absolutely the worst time to try to make a life in the United States since WWII ended 80 years ago, and there's every reason to believe it is going to continue to get worse for a long time. I have no idea why you are dismissive of people saying this is a difficult time.

            • rendang · 8 hours ago

              The standard of living/real GDP per capita or per hour of work is about as high as it's ever been.

        • solenoid0937 · 5 hours ago

          Have you read a history book to gain even the slightest comprehension of what the human condition was like before our era? It is the best it has ever been.

    • cannonpalms · 12 hours ago

      Spoken like someone terminally online & without children. If this is your view of reality (I believe it is an utter fiction but nonetheless), then I don't know how you propose things to be improved without smart people procreating.

    • throw310822 · 11 hours ago

      What's funny about this attitude is that people were having a lot of children when half of them died in their childhood and for those left there were famines, pestilences, wars, no painkillers or anesthesia and no medicines for anything . The reality is that we don't make many children because our life is way too comfortable for that.

  • altcognito · 13 hours ago

    Probably should have left off the kids, but lets start with just distrusting anybody who wants to live forever. At the level of influence billionaires have, it is downright dangerous. For everyone else confused: Think of all the people throughout history we would prefer would not have lived forever. Then multiple that by A LOT. Then consider how greedy and sociopathic most of the billionaire class is already. Now, we could spend time getting distracted by childless. I don't think it matters.

    • Windchaser · 12 hours ago

      I mean, wanting billionaires to not live forever (read: wanting power structures to not become excessively entrenched) is a pretty different thing. I'd even be fine with people who are billionaires living forever, so long as they don't remain billionaires / don't fuck with politics / etc.

      • altcognito · 11 hours ago

        You can't have your cake and eat it too. Fundamentally the problem with living forever goes beyond billionaires. People get stuck in their ways of thinking, the mindset of living forever is completely different. Why should I even listen to someone who only lives a mere 40 years? What is a suitable punishment for someone that lives forever? How does it change murder? Philosophically, living forever may be corrupt by nature. The only way to tear down tiers of society is for some of those tiers to literally die off.

  • lukeify · 13 hours ago

    > I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids. I have reduced trust in people who make judgements about the value systems of others based on fairly meaningless characteristics.

    • password54321 · 11 hours ago

      Aging is one of the only real equalisers. Maybe the greatest equaliser. Though those that have become old seemed to have become more stubborn in holding on to power but even that will pass.

  • carra · 13 hours ago

    I mean, if people start living forever, they better stop having kids... at least until we colonize other planets.

  • modeless · 12 hours ago

    I would like him to cure aging too! I have kids, am I allowed to want to live indefinitely?

  • bagacrap · 5 hours ago

    It seems pretty apparent that he thinks Claude is his child and Claude deserves as much or more rights/resources/respect/self-determination as a human child.

• risyachka · 13 hours ago

  >> the solution to AI's PR problem is to cure cancer I think its much simpler than that. Anything actually useful for people would be a good solution. Obviously image gen and code gen is not the case, as though it does increase productivity, it doesn't make anyone's life actually better. If it led to 4 day work week - sure. Otherwise it could easily be net negative.

  • BurningFrog · 13 hours ago

    If something is being used, it's by definition useful, and AI is used a lot .

    • Epa095 · 11 hours ago

      Like fentanyl, tobacco, heroin, sugar,... All very useful...

• Chance-Device · 13 hours ago

  Really now, everything is bad? Trying to cure diseases? Talking about it? That’s bad somehow! Let me sit here on my ass and do nothing instead.

  • Banditoz · 13 hours ago

    Who are you referring to? This reads like projection.

    • Chance-Device · 13 hours ago

      Read the comment. This is cynical and bad because they’re going to advertise that they’re trying to do something socially beneficial. It’s the top rated comment in the thread. Somebody tried to do something good, this is the response. This pisses me off severely.

      • AndrewKemendo · 13 hours ago

        It’s because these people do not believe they are trying to do something good, but instead run a cynical plot to get more powerful under the guise

      • airstrike · 11 hours ago

        You're only seeing part of the picture and you're pissed off about how people dislike the whole other part of the picture you're disregarding. No wonder it feels confusing.

        • Chance-Device · 11 hours ago

          Your comment is vacuous. There isn’t any other part of the picture. Trying to advance medicine is inherently good. It doesn’t matter how much you use it for marketing. None of what they have done is fake or useless, it is at worst early.

          • suddenlybananas · 10 hours ago

            Unit 731 supposedly advanced medicine no?

            • Chance-Device · 1 hour ago

              This is just silly.

              • suddenlybananas · 1 hour ago

                The point is just you can't just insist on looking at the pros and ignoring the cons of something broad.

          • airstrike · 10 hours ago

            > There isn’t any other part of the picture. Except there is. At the risk of mixing pop references, you're a Sith dealing in absolutes saying "doesn't look like anything to me".

            • Chance-Device · 10 hours ago

              Would you care to state what this picture is?

              • airstrike · 9 hours ago

                Misrepresenting matters of fact with regards to AI capabilities, their perceived threat to the public, as well as unorthodox accounting that wouldn't pass the smell test of a summer intern in Wall Street, all to fuel an unsustainable hype in the hopes that (1) the government enacts regulatory capture to create a moat for AI foundries by fiat and (2) the incoming IPO miraculously fixes the propped up valuations secured in private markets. First, do no harm.

                • Chance-Device · 1 hour ago

                  If that’s your picture then I see why you didn’t just come out and say it in your first reply. It’s all your own speculation and still has nothing to do with the fact that trying to make medical progress is a good thing.

  • modeless · 12 hours ago

    In fact, I think it's great and I'm rooting for them. I just don't think it's likely to improve AI's public image anytime soon.

    • Chance-Device · 12 hours ago

      Glad to hear how you feel about it. However, and this applies more generally than your comment above, what people online often forget is that there is such a thing as both positive and negative reinforcement. If you don’t reinforce good behaviours as well as denouncing bad ones, then you don’t get good outcomes.

  • yurimo · 4 hours ago

    This is cheap. Plenty of scientists, many of whom are my friends, are working very hard on finding new therapies for cancer, they were doing it before genomic models came along and still doing it now. The amount of times something in the media is lauded as "holy grail" that is never heard from again because it either only works in mice or turns out to be toxic or 100s of different reasons is massive. In my opinion this attitude of putting rose glasses on is detrimental to scientific progress. People outside of cancer research routinely underestimate how hard it is to find a working protocol. I think it is better to have sober attitude because it allows one to see the limitations and challenges that need to be tackled, blindly hoping AI can solve everything and deliver miracle cures is exactly the attitude that lets people sit on their asses and do nothing.

• segmondy · 13 hours ago

  You can't say this. We have no idea. There is nothing about the law of physics that pushes cancer cure a long time away. A lot of people would have told you AI was decades away, yet here we are. We are still on track for possible strong take off. Now on real world testing, you think the rule applies? I tell you it doesn't. Human life might be precious, but human life in practice is also not precious. We waste so much of it. In some countries regulations will stop/slow it, but there are plenty of places around the world that will turn a blind eye for a fistful of dollars. Countries will go to those locations if it means gaining an edge.

  • whatisthiseven · 13 hours ago

    Cancer is something like, thousands of diseases. There is no "cure for cancer", but there are treatments and vaccines for cancers.

  • no_multitudes · 13 hours ago

    There are many things about the laws of physics that push a cancer cure a long time away! Biology is downstream of physics, and the biology of cancer is so vast that the very concept of a "cure for cancer" is almost nonsensical.

  • SpicyLemonZest · 13 hours ago

    There's a lot about biology that makes cancer fundamentally hard to treat, and the efficacy of cancer treatments fundamentally hard to measure. I'm optimistic that we'll eventually get to a point where we can meaningfully say we "cured cancer", but it will almost certainly be a cluster of thousands of treatment protocols which each have to be tested over 5-10 years for recurrence. There's no reason to expect that there should exist any broad-spectrum cancer treatment better than radiotherapy, or any fast test to determine whether long-term remission will be achieved.

  • qlte · 12 hours ago

    Appeals to laws of physics as a "first principles" attempt to explain how thousands of diverse diseases could theoretically be solved overnight by a big computer (while hand waving away the years of clinical trials, false starts and failures involved in a single new successful treatment) just makes you seem wildly out of touch and uninformed about the actual problem space.

  • dekhn · 12 hours ago

    There are many laws of physics that say that cures for cancer- general ones that treat a wide array of cancers and are effectively permanent with no reoccurrence- are a long time away. Cancer is subtle. Cancer is wily. Cancer is tightly integrated with our eukaryotic nature. AI was decades away, for decades! It took a wide range of conditions to be satisfied before it became clear it was a powerful tool. Also, medical people rarely use the term "cure cancer", as we have too much experience with recurrence of the "same" cancer (not just in the same location, but a genetic descendent of the original cancer).

• mikert89 · 13 hours ago

  please no more doomer talk, can we just be excited that we have ai doing science

  • hardbass · 13 hours ago

    I am already having a headache thinking of the whining from the biologist community (if any? I hope their reaction is not as extreme as that of mathematicians).

    • mikert89 · 12 hours ago

      easily the biggest deal in these fields for a while, and all we get is complaining

• kanzure · 13 hours ago

  Yep, my prediction is that Anthropic is going to use Claude's reputation to "launder" known solutions to aging, cancer, and other things that society hasn't accepted quite yet. But maybe with the right marketing we'll try those things! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329717

• JumpCrisscross · 13 hours ago

  > Dario believes that the solution to AI's PR problem is to cure cancer He isn’t wrong. But selling potential cures for cancer won’t cut it.

• walt_grata · 13 hours ago

  Its going to be an uphill battle. Every story about job losses, consequences to the community from building a datacenter (real or perceived), eminent domain case that blows up, plus all the slop on every platform. Not to mention a lot of normies think techbros are obnoxious, and that is who is hyping ai. They'll need to show their goal is to help humanity and that all the other peoole arent acceptable collateral damage. Since those other people get to vote.

• impulser_ · 13 hours ago

  As they should because things like this get people thinking even if it something small. Once you get people thinking about things you tend to get solutions.

• Sol- · 13 hours ago

  Also the general public might find the implications of AGI so distasteful even if everything goes well that we might stall out or get the Butlerian Jihad before we can cure cancer. Artists and Software Engineers, now also Mathematicians, already have existential crises, but the public still thinks AI is fake. I can't imagine the backlash when the realize what's coming even in the good ending.

• mirekrusin · 13 hours ago

  Given his background (biophysics PhD, postdoc at Stanford School of Medicine) and that medicine was the core of Machines of Loving Grace back in 2024 it reads less like PR and more like a long-held goal, no? Personally I'm actually surprised it took so long. Agree trials won't compress much with AI in the near future. But they're starting with basic discovery rather than therapeutics – that part can move fast. I'd also judge it less by what result is and more by the rate of change – even a year ago ~1k agents running ~1d on single prompt producing wet-lab-verifiable leads wasn't really a thing.

• AbsurdCensor · 12 hours ago

  Real world approvals for drugs are accelerating through, even with all the steps. Think about it, Moderna went from zero, to approved vaccine in 10 months. While COVID vaccines were the exception, not the rule, there are ways to accelerate the process if there is will and $$$. In the last 20 years, the number of new drug approvals per year in the US has doubled, and the length of time to get approval has been cut in half.

  • modeless · 12 hours ago

    > the length of time to get approval has been cut in half. Is this true? I haven't heard this before. Cost to get approved is also important, are we making progress there?

    • dekhn · 12 hours ago

      No, the parent post was just using a single example that used an expedited method.

• asciimov · 5 hours ago

  Gotta be first to get the patent, a blanket cancer cure would be worth trillions.

I think this approach of actually doing useful science is better PR than hiring an army of influencers to shill for you, OpenAI style. Generally speaking, hiring an army of influencers to shill for you results in bad PR, and comments like this one.