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Comment by liyamchitayat | Hacker News Reader

Hi!

I agree with you, which is why I wrote this- but if you google "are mitochondria alive" gemini says it isn't. And yes, the cells in your heart have an effective and potenitial niche!

We seem to have many tools to engineer viruses, but few to engineer mitochondria- perhaps considering them as alive could change that!

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I am not sure you should be relying on an LLM as any indication of anything...

More seriously, considering something as being alive in order to engineer them better does not necessarily change the fact of them actually being alive or not, in my opinion.

If LLMs work the way I understand them to, they are trained on large corpora which contain a statistical preponderance of statements which are consistent with the current scientific mainstream, so it may not be completely crazy to try doing this; you'd get the scientific mainstream explanation, and possibly a few alternative hypotheses if they had enough literature support.

> which are consistent with the current scientific mainstream

This seems to require a high amount of curation of training inputs, but I haven't done real digging into it, just going off the more casual "all of stackoverflow" or "all of reddit" type comments frequently thrown around. But if there is such a curation I'd agree, I just don't think there is that curation.

Why would it be consistent with the scientific mainstream? Unless there's evidence that scientific reports and material are specifically up-weighted during training and prioritised somehow, whatever an LLM says will be only consistent with its training material, which could have any proportion of fake articles, Reddit posts, Quora responses, encyclopedia pages and joke blogs

You don't know what the training data is and what each category's weights are, so how can you assume that?

Most use common crawl, and most seem to upweight the scientific publication part of it (from what I gather speaking to folks who train LLM models).

You are literally saying this novel thing is wrong because this thing that can't say novel things says the thing that's not novel is not novel.

> if you google "are mitochondria alive" gemini says it isn't

And my grandmother is a bicycle.

Still one of my favorite idioms

Therefore, a man needs God like a fish needs your grandmother!

I just tried that and it said:

>Yes, mitochondria are alive, though they are not considered "living" in the same way as a cell because they can't function independently...

Maybe it's learning!

Or maybe the temperature is set too high! Probably don't start with a single LLM response as the basis for your understanding of scientific consensus.

Eukaryotes generally can’t survive without mitochondria either. It seems silly to discuss if different subsystems in a living organism are independently “alive.” It’s a bit like arguing if just the wings or just the engine of an airplane are flying machines.

You are completely right that we should be thinking far more creatively about manipulating mitochondria. There are a lot of diseases (including Covid) that have mitochondrial aspects. I just don't think calling them alive helps, other than to get you some decent exposure on HN :)

"Gemini" says? So what?

It shows there are misconceptions out there, if only in LLMs.

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