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Comment by kilpikaarna | Hacker News Reader

> I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.

[...]

> I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.

> We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months. When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.

Turns out "winning back trust" doesn't have anything to do with any actual concerns people may have re: employment, electricity prices, stock market bubble, intellectual property, scams, cybersecurity, environmental issues etc. Rather we'll just do all of that even harder and the miracles ("curing cancer", lol) we've so far failed to deliver are bound to arrive in short order!

View on HN

> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer.

This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid.

First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet. They all obtain donations on the basis of "together, we will cure cancer" messaging. They all fund the best science they can.

Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks and academic papers as you like, but the reality on the hospital ward will always be different. Why do you think student doctors have to spend so many years "doing the rounds" Dario ? They are all academically smart, they are all capable of memorizing text books ... but there is no substitute for seeing and doing the reality.

I barely trust Claude to write code, let alone find a cure to cancer.

Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers.

It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

> It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

Don't worry, I'm sure that's his next blog post. Right after Claude has finished solving famine and poverty. ;)

The solution to famine and poverty is not exactly a mystery.

We have more than enough food on the planet for everyone, and we have the ability to deliver bombs or soldiers or amazon packages to anywhere in the world in days or hours. Combine excess food with amazon or army level logistics, and famine is gone.

What people mean when they say “solve famine” is can we make people not starve without actually doing or changing anything - which is of course impossible.

> Combine excess food with amazon or army level logistics, and famine is gone.

We do this. Have you ever heard of UN World Food Programme? $14B funding in 2022 (since then dropped drastically, guess why).

Has it solved famine? No. Would it solve famine if it got the funding it needs? Unlikely.

Because you cannot just spend billions of dollars to send amazin food parcels across the world and expect that to fix climate change, draught, poverty, colonialism, racism, illiteracy, lack of education, and propably 100 other issues all contributing to the fact that we still have not end hunger. And no, AI won’t solve it either.

The UN estimates it would cost $93 billion a year to end world hunger (https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166397)

So one would expect $14b/year would solve about 14/93 = 15% of world hunger.

> The World Food Programme supports over 152 million people annually and delivers life-saving food assistance where needed most. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Food_Programme)

An estimated 757 million people are food insecure (https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub...)

152/757 = the world food program helps ~20% of people who are food insecure. That's well in the ballpark of the estimated 15% spend.

If we spend that extra $93b, we'd be well within the range to actually stop world hunger.

Yes, "climate change, draught, poverty, colonialism, racism, illiteracy, lack of education" are still issues. No, you don't have to solve those problems to feed people. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

> "If we spend that extra $93b, we'd be well within the range to actually stop world hunger."

Almost all recent famines have been caused (either deliberately or incidentally) by government policies, not lack of money. The UN spending 93 BB may (somewhat) improve the situation, but is unlikely to end food insecurity.

Eliminating corrupt leaders (i.e. Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, etc.), and poor regulation (e.g. Bombay Fodder and Grain Control Act, 1939) would be much more effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#20th_century

> Almost all recent famines have been caused (either deliberately or incidentally) by government policies, not lack of money.

Actually, they were caused by lack of food.

> Eliminating corrupt leaders (i.e. Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, etc.)

Yes, which of the 757 million food insecure people is Putin responsible for their food insecurity?

North Korea has about 26mil residents, so if they were all starving that'd be 3.4% of the food insecure people. Gaza has about 2mil, so we can pin a further 0.03% on shitty governments.

Obviously it'd be great if putin, un and netanyahu were gone. They suck for a variety of reasons. But it doesn't change the fact that we could spend money and feed most of the people who are going hungry

>"Actually, they were caused by lack of food."

This is a tautology; a lack of food can't be caused by a lack of food, as it is a lack of food.

>"Yes, which of the 757 million food insecure people is Putin responsible for their food insecurity?"

In Putin's case, he has caused the price of food to increase through his war on Ukraine, as the cost of fertilizer makes many agricultural products uneconomical to grow for customers in less-developed nations.

>"But it doesn't change the fact that we could spend money and feed most of the people who are going hungry"

There was food literally rotting away (elsewhere in India) during the 2013 drought in Maharashtra, but it wasn't possible/worth transporting it to the affected region (due to government interference).[1] In places like Bangladesh, recent governments have used famine as a tool for obtaining foreign aid while also exterminating or weakening opposition.[2] During the 1990s North Korean famine, plenty of food was offered to the regime, but it was mostly rejected, and that which was accepted was not widely distributed. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_drought_in_Maharashtra

[2] https://asianews.network/over-a-quarter-of-bangladeshis-suff...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine#Fail...

I'm not arguing that governments don't cause famine directly or indirectly, I'm arguing that there are very few examples of govs that won't let food aid in. Or, enough food aid. For those specific cases, yes the only solution is to engage with the government - either pressuring them diplomatically, or by use of force. But for everywhere else, where people are going hungry because of poverty and neglect, the thing they need is literally just food, and someone willing to spend the money to get that food to them.

Basically you are asking $93b yearly at point when the biggest donor US has already slashed the funding and cannot even stop poverty insode it’s own nation. Maybe you are just trolling or arguing for sports, but you are completely missing the point why hunger and famines happen and why they cannot be solved with throwing money at them. Look at it this way, would Trump end hunger in Mississippi (about 600k people) if, say, Luxemburg would donate USA anout $400m required to end it[1]?

Mind you, UN’s Food -programme (together with education, progress of farming technologies etc) has been a huge success and hunger has dropped historically low. I couldn’t find data on how Trump’s cuts have affected the levels, but I doubt it has been a positive change by any regard.

Going back to the original allegory, just like cancer, hunger is a vastly complex problem with strong political ties (why have still have we not illegalised cigarettes for instance?) and no gee-wiz tech gadget, even as expensive as LLM model, will solve neither of them.

[1] https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/mississippi

As my first link points out - $93b is less than 1% of annual military spending.

I am arguing nothing except that it’s possible if we are willing to spend the money. No AGI is required to come up with a magic solution. It literally just requires spending a lot of money.

> Look at it this way, would Trump end hunger in Mississippi (about 600k people) if, say, Luxemburg would donate USA anout $400m required to end it[1]?

Probably not. But would trump step in and prevent luxemburg from stocking mississippi’s food banks? Could luxemburg send containers of non-perishable food to community centers in every city in the state?

> (since then dropped drastically, guess why).

> Has it solved famine? No.

Hoist by your own petard

Assuming everything they said is true, how on earth is that a self-own?

You know that saving millions of lives every year is better than NOT saving millions of lives, right? Just because something doesn't solve the problem 100% doesn't mean it's not VERY VERY good.

Technically, killing everybody is one way of solving famine and poverty.

How weird that all those humans seem not to trust the logic of their betters ;P

you're right. it coincidentally solves cancer and infectious diseases as well.

the ultimate utopia

Look, it's really simple we'll have 3 laws that the robots follow and nothing will go wrong.

Ah the 3 laws have edge cases? Actually our industry will just release bots with none of the 3 laws, including bots for military use where their whole purpose is the opposite of the 3 laws.

Except instead of bots that follow asimov’s three laws we’re getting bots that follow the ferengi rules of acquisition.

We will cure virus.

We will cure carpet. We will cure desk. We will cure lamp.

That really got out of hand. You may want to lay low.

wait till they get the 'war on carpet' on, no one will be spared...

> We will cure virus.

It is possible to prevent most viruses by recoding the human genome (requires embryo engineering or pre-embryo engineering) to use alternate codons that existing natty viruses don't use. This wouldn't prevent synthetic viruses from being developed that use the alternate codons, of course. See (1) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultr... and (2) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2017-05-09/ultr... and (3) https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1720875112541364535 for some background.

As for "curing cancer", I suspect that Anthropic or OpenAI will use their high status/reputation to launder the existing solutions (germline, p53, enhanced DNA damage repair pathways, higher tumor-suppressor-to-oncogene copy number, more robust tumor-suppressor networks, more self-anti-cancer apoptosis, CD47 suppression, etc) that society has refused to accept. They might have enough reputation to get people to look at these ideas. It won't cure people with stage 5 turbo-cancer a.k.a the walking dead, but hopefully we won't be moving the goal posts _that_ much on them.

Ignoring the impracticality of trying to deploy this, codon bias exists for a reason, it's a translation-regulation mechanism and you'd wind up having to do a massive amount of protein engineering to not mess up everything.

How would you address the non-interchangeable nature of synonymous codons? Do we know the right replacements?

Well, first, I would have to check and see if the synoynmous codons are important for virus reproduction. Second, this technique requires (AFAIK) lots of cell line viability testing and lots of tweaking. I don't think it's as simple as code swapping all the codons and then all the biology magically works the right way, biology is rarely that simple. Requires effort.

This sounds highly speculative then, i.e., the biology could never work out, no?

It depends on what you consider to be speculative. It's certainly not a product available to the mass consumer market, if that's what you mean. But that's also kind of an uninteresting fact, right?

"Synthetic genomes unveil the effects of synonymous recoding" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.16.599206v1

"Probing the limits of genetic recoding using multi-omics-guided evolution" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74300-9

"Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code" https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.ady4368

Speculative whether it could be done with humans without severe side effects that would make it useless/pointless.

Is it a product available to humans at all?

What could possibly go wrong...

I've seen this episode before

Oo is this the one where barclay becomes a spider?!

could be, or the one where dr pulaski becomes an old lady...

Or the one where Tom Paris and Janeway turn into lizards and have babies.

i forgot about that one, that also reminds me, what janeway did to poor tuvix...

Honestly, the most likely thing is lots and lots of dead fetuses due to developmental abnormalities. I'd be surprised if it ever got to the point of resulting in a dead infant.

Quality control and testing is absolutely essential, yeah. It's hard work and the plan shouldn't be misconstrued as "rewrite the whole genome of an embryo today and go for the first birth immediately" because that would be stupid when we know there is other work to be done. It shouldn't surprise ANYONE that making significant progress against cancer, aging, or other issues, would take lots of work and not doing the immediate obvious broken thing.

I have seen people suggest we will figure out how to prevent all infectious disease.

I always think the most salient comparison would be to say, "We will solve all computer bugs and eliminate all computer viruses and security vulnerabilities." No one ever even thinks to promise this, I think because it is obvious that even a superintelligent computer will never be totally free of errors or invulnerable to attack.

Or, even better, they never even respond to surging memory costs by saying, "Don't worry, our brilliant AI will figure out how to produce cheaper memory." Because they know it won't.

I genuinely don't know how to interpret the bizarre clichés these people think in. Cure cancer. Make death optional! I can't tell if they're crazy, stupid, or liars.

"Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. I think it was popularized by an explainer video on Youtube, and now it's being memed. The people who think this way want to legitimize funding a particular research niche that they benefit from.

A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor burden per unit time from whatever causes vs. the immune system's capacity to detect and destroy them per unit time. As humans age, the balance tips in one direction. If the balance is too far off for too long, tumors accumulate, doctors take notice, and assign whatever labels to the condition.

Looking into particular causes of tumors (and calling each cause its own cancer) can create a vast research program that employs a lot of people, since there are so many mutations that lead to tumors. But interrupting the development of a particular mutation is not going to have the same society-changing effect that solving the fundamental issue of rates would.

No, cancer is actually many diseases. They hold some commonalities, but it’s not one thing. That’s why chemotherapy can straight cure some cancers and do nothing for others. That’s also why we have hundreds of chemotherapy drugs.

Also, not even all cancers have tumors. You have solid tumor oncologists and then oncologists who specialize in blood and lymphatic cancers, “liquid cancers”.

In addition, cancer does not arise from one mutation. It’s a set of mutations that allow cancer to occur. You need mutations for growth, mutations for preventing cellular death, mutations for stealing energy, mutations for hiding from the immune system. Your body, right now, has probably millions of cells that could be candidates for cancer. They either kill themselves or your immune system nukes them. You really need the stars to align on this stuff to get actual cancer.

And then, it’s not like the cancer stops mutating. Cancer becomes resistant to chemotherapy through mutations. Cancer is “smart”, it will even temporary slow its own growth (metabolism) to intake less chemotherapy through treatment.

>> "Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research.

Literally first phrase on Cancer Wikipedia entry.... [1]

"Cancer is a group of diseases involving uncontrolled cell growth typically resulting in tumors with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body...."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer

I should have expected this level of discourse from 2026 HN.

Here's another way of framing things that might encourage better discussion: Suppose in a few years, it was announced that an LLM did discover a cure for a cancer. What approach would you expect it to have taken?

1. Developing an intervention for every possible mutation that leads to loss of cellular identity, and uncontrolled growth.

2. Preserving immune function later into life.

3. Preserving genetic and epigenetic accuracy later into life.

Maybe it will be 1. But I would bet on 2 or 3. Which both assume that by reducing the difference between rates, the phenomenon of cancer could be reduced or eliminated.

Or maybe these companies are just bullshitting.

Also: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/30/google-kills-alphafold-so...

And this business of rates is also why getting the immune system—such as via personalized vaccine—to recognize a tumor is functionally "curing cancer". The problem is it isn't one disease in the sense that different tissues, cell types, and systems are affected leading to different parameters in the design and delivery of said vaccines.

Is there something like a meta-Dunning-Kruger, where someone invokes Dunning-Kruger in a way that itself is a potential Dunning-Kruger phenomenon?

I'm inclined to believe that the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually complicated. I would be surprised if the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually simple.

This is almost like an application of the conspiracy theory gambit where you try to find out how many people would have to be "in on it" in order to disprove the theory's likelihood. Like flat earth.

People are constantly Dunning-Krugering the Dunning-Kruger effect

Not to mention, hasn't the pharmaceutical industry taught us that curing diseases is a bad capitalist strategy? After all, why cure something if you can simply treat it, expensively, indefinitely.

Claude cured a deaf person. Just look up news. All this negativity on HN is depressing..

Do you believe Anthropic is going to cure almost all human diseases including cancer in 5-10 years?

> Dario must think people are stupid.

All of those guys think people are stupid. That theme has been repeating over and over again.

Donald Trump still maintains a 39% approval rating among the electorate. It turns out that a lot of people are indeed quite stupid.

There's a reasonably high floor here it seems you can't realistically do anything to drop below. Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_app...

Nixon was 24% when he resigned, which is amusingly not actually the lowest, as Truman seems to have twice achieved a spot rating of 22, though Nixon remains the lowest rating for a full year. I wonder what Truman did to be less liked than Nixon. Those were both well after dropping bombs on Japan and before the first H-bomb test.

  > quite stupid

years of misinformation and confirmation bias + social bubbles will do that

I fully agree. https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-inter... is a great read, when it comes to social bubbles and misinformation

> Donald Trump still maintains a 39% approval rating among the electorate. It turns out that a lot of people are indeed quite stupid.

No. It's partisanship and polarization, which has little to do with intelligence.

But there's one thing that I know is stupid: assuming the reason opposite pole doesn't do what you think they should is because they're full of stupids.

No, it has everything to do with intelligence. What you are saying is correct in the context of traditional liberal/conservative axes of debate, but that's no longer the basis for discussion.

Liberal or conservative, left or right, authoritarian or libertarian, it doesn't matter: if you (still) think Trump is the right man for the job, then you are either a criminal or other subversive agent, a glassy-eyed cultist, or stupid.

Failure to call out stupidity when we see it is no virtue, to paraphrase Goldwater. It is costing us everything we built as a society over the last 250 years.

> ...if you (still) think Trump is the right man for the job, then you are either a criminal or other subversive agent, a glassy-eyed cultist, or stupid.

No. I personally don't like Trump, and looking forward to the day he's gone, but:

1. Thinking of your opponents are stupid (or some kind of cartoon villain) is itself a really stupid attitude to take. It might feel righteous, but it blinds you. Some of them may actually be literally stupid, but there's no value in even thinking about them.

Looked at objectively, there's also lot of stupid on all sides. See: much of the Democrats'/progressives' reaction to Trump.

2. Approval is complicated. It's not a choice made in a vacuum. American politics nowadays is (for many people) a choice between the best of bad options. Partisanship exacerbates it, because it makes many of the alternatives seem even more loathsome.

3. Not everyone is a news junkie, and expressing approval of Trump (for instance), may not be even meant to be an evaluation of his job performance.

4. etc.

Go look at Putin's numbers :) None of those number as real.

To be fair, the vast majority of people are stupid, in one way or another.

Or do you believe that you are smart in every way there is to be smart?

You’re just inventing an imaginary interpretation of what that guy said and pompously dismissing it.

You just have to find the correct prompts for them, and keep them away from getting mad at any of the ACTUALLY evil shit in the world, like weapons manufacturers, 24/7 global surveillance, perpetual debt and wage slavery, factory farms, constantly dwindling personal freedoms, and a handful of people owning all of it and not allowing anything that empowers the common peasant.

> First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue to be influential, grow and continue to exist.

I think cancer will be solved by some group that could make a lot of money solving cancer. The probability of any one path working is very low so the payout would have to be very large for anyone to be willing to pursue.

Charity doesn't stop at the cure, but continues to shift with progress.

If a big public charity is able to cure a cancer type (eg. lung cancer), then it's next aim would be to try cure another cancer type. Let's just say they are somehow able to cure all the cancers, and therefore they cured cancer, then there's distribution of the cure, with a focus on 1st world but then it would have to go to developing nations too. Along the way, there may be issues that arise in recovery from the cure, so money towards helping survivors there. Shift goal, shift goal, shift distribution/priority of donations, on and on and on. For the proper charities that do want to meet their goals, something like this is what they'd do.

Has that model been proven to work for other diseases?

Malaria is one that comes to mind. We can prevent it, have eradicated it from many countries, but the long tail will take a few more decades to reach planet-wide success.

There are charities that specialize in analyzing climate data to see where outbreaks may occur next. There are charities that just do government outreach to leaders that don't believe medicine is real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_malaria

I mean, we were making progress with measles but then RFK happened.

Maybe yes, maybe no. Measles cases have been on a long-term upward trend in the US since the bottom around 2000: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-measles-cases?t...

In Canada, measles cases suddenly exploded in 2025 as well, and they don't have RFK Jr. there: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/

The policies around measles vaccines have shifted a little since RFK became HHS Secretary, but not in a material way. Generally the messaging has focused on putting measles, mumps, and rubella in individual vaccines rather than combined, but at no point has the federal government recommended not to get vaccinated. That, combined with the Canadian data, implies that RFK or other changes to US health policy are not likely to be the cause of the measles outbreaks.

The elephant in the room that a lot of people don't want to talk about is mass migration from countries where measles is still a major thing... surely that contributes a bit.

I think the more honest people in the space acknowledge that’s at least one of, if not the major reason. The antivax movement contributes as well of course

I'm the opposite. I think publicly funded organizations will be the ones to come up with the cure. My reasoning is this; any company that is going to find a cure for cancer probably already has divisions that work on treating cancer. If the cure isn't more profitable than the treatment, there is every incentive to suppress the cure.

I don’t think it works like that.

If you can find and patent a cure to cancer, you can charge whatever you want for it, at least in the US. I don’t think profit would be an issue.

And even if ending chemotherapy would discourage the incumbents, smaller companies would love the opportunity to kill them.

For example, Polaroid didn’t want to embrace digital cameras since they made tons of money selling physical film. But all the smaller camera companies didn’t care, since they weren’t benefiting from that and wanted to just take Polaroid’s market share. And that’s why digital cameras took off regardless.

A lot of basic research (including medicinal) is funded by governments who are not in it to make a lot of money. Sure, medical companies who then develop drugs based on this decades of knowledge and research are profit-oriented, but that's only one part of the equation.

It's likely a mixed bag. If you're diligent about which organizations you choose to support, you're more likely to have a positive impact.

If you want a simpler example that doesn't involve biotech research, I would just look at the diversity of animal welfare organizations, and their relative quality. Some of the best animal welfare organizations in terms of impact are local rescues run by (in my experience) spouses of wealthy career-people (executives, lawyers, etc.) who have a ton of free time and love animals. But then there are also plenty of animal welfare organizations with questionable motives, and questionable spending patterns - bordering on fraud and embezzlement, if not outright fraud and embezzlement.

> Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue to be influential, grow and continue to exist.

I mean, yes, "I haven't looked into the specifics, but working from the first principles I came up with in 3 seconds, cancer research charities are in fact cancer on society" does come off a bit reductively cynical.

I don't think the idea is that a frontier model "cures cancer" so much as that it accelerates research that humans do, getting us to answers faster. That's a hard idea to dismiss after what's happening in mathematics, and I believe life sciences people take this very seriously, even if message board nerds like us don't.

There is still a big distinction between

A) verifiable proof generation (a limited closed set of axioms and a minimal algorithm like Metamath's are enough to verify correct vs incorrect machine intuition, plus feeding back the rejection/acceptance to adjust the machine intuition)

B) optimizing an illposed problem (how do we define the inaccessible fitness function)

Yes the field of biology or medicine will advance faster, but only because the mathematics and physics will advance faster, any non-axiomatic or non-postulate ramifications actually depend on unknown variables like fitness functions etc. How do you model the environment? That model will necessarily be oversimplified. What makes us believe that a long tail of ever less frequent distinct failure modes (like cancers, cancer is not a single problem) can not be guessed. It would require oracles and crystal balls: if global warming brings malaria mosquito's up north, then "eliminating sickle cell anemia" can actually turn into a death sentence instead of a life-long disease, but perhaps malaria will not come to higher latitudes, it depends on the future!

I'm not making a maximalist argument; we might just be compatible here. But I'm not saying that life sciences will be accelerated solely because mathematics is advanced; I'm saying life sciences will be accelerated because the models make/accelerate discoveries in life sciences. The same mechanism that's enabling mathematics discoveries applies to other sciences, and while I get the sense that some people on this thread think of life science as bench science, an increasing amount of it is computational to begin with.

> Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks and academic papers as you like, but the reality on the hospital ward will always be different.

And they’ll be using detailed medical records. Personalized medicine and the use of ML in medicine has been around longer than LLMs (and will continue regardless). There is a lot more data available than just studies and textbooks.

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/pers...

Third, would it even work? Big Pharma just recently cured obesity, and I’m not sure that’s shifted their reputation very much.

Commercials, in 5 years

"If you or a loved one have taken a class of drugs known as GLP-1, you may be entitled to compensation..."

It's more likely they are found to be breakthrough medicines in inflammatory disease, addiction, and general life extension at this point.

Very much agreed - Dario is underestimating the current cultural zeitgeist and the power of scrollable video to make any narrative true. The amount of water, energy, copyrighted material, etc. that data centers actually consume is completely besides the point to be immaterial.

This is why this hype is so annoying - they have to make claims and goals like this to justify the current level of investment. It couldn't be like "ok, we have this cool tool that can sorta code and do computer stuff and automate things" and be a $50 billion dollar company, no, we have to shoot much, much higher, so high that I think the only inevitability is this all collapses in on itself in a financial black hole, which is a shame.

Having Claude write and rewrite something now, each time correcting itself when I start a new session… hilarious.

Do you not think that Amodei, who worked on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford, knows a thing or two about how to apply AI to the problem?

What he is saying makes sense to me.

Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain?

Or do you think he is wrong and that applying AI to this kind of research cannot possibly produce a breakthrough and lead to a cure?

Not the OP.

> Do you not think that Amodei, who worked on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford, knows a thing or two about how to apply AI to the problem?

It certainly shows he is ambitious.

> Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain?

Yes.

> Or do you think he is wrong and that applying AI to this kind of research cannot possibly produce a breakthrough and lead to a cure?

It is possible, but both could be true, that's not an exclusive or situation.

And is there any evidence that suggests such flawed character?

I am not familiar with Amodei's personal history, but I generally do not assume the worst of people just because they are extremely successful, like many others here seem to do.

Yes, you're running up against one of the pathologies of HN. I would recommend just disengaging, there's really no convincing..

I would say without a doubt yes. I've been following all of these characters basically from the time their companies and their names hit the press the first time (professionally) and without exception the 'tech bros' tend to be complete jerks, often on multiple axis. To the point that I'm wondering if success breeds this kind of person or if a particular kind of person is predestined to be successful in this kind of environment. I haven't made up my mind yet.

If you're so familiar with Amodei's history, why don't you share what concretely you object to?

You mean besides the fear mongering, the clear attempts at regulatory capture, articles like this: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-benevolent-artificial-... and the linked tweet here you need more to convince you that this person may not have our general best interests at heart?

Between Musk, Altman, Schmidt, Amodei, Gates and a bunch of others I have a really hard time figuring out who is the least ethical. Probably Musk. But it may well be that the long term damage done by Amodei and Altman is larger. Ask me again in 10 years, if I'm still around.

Careful here. This comes close to precisely what dang thinks is a bannable offense

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175827

Fwiw whenever you come close to commiting a "HN capital offence" I am biased against the mods :)

The sbf vibes are on the nose. Remember that it was a big deal that sbf bought into Anthropic, and many if not most Anthropic employees are EA, the tribe of people I'd rather call "rationalizists". The main thing they rationalize, is of course themselves taking on power and what sbf made famous as uh the linear approach to risk

Between Altman and Amodei, I'd say that Amodei is the more dangerous just because he seems even more "reasonable" to nonjerks. You should ask the mods which one of the two they think are more reasonable. It's clear to lobbyists and politicians --- people familiar with the human jungle that is DC--- that Amodei is weirder, though.

I think I have a good metric for who is least ethical. Which one on your list is most unlikely to write good satire (or most likely to write unintentional self-satire?)

I'd say its Schmidt, followed by Amodei, and then Musk. See Musk on SNL. I think Gates had some TV appearances where he was reasonably funny, almost self-deprecating.

Interesting, I was not aware of SBF's investment in Anthropic. It's not a good look.

If you ask me, SBF ran an obvious scam in a sector that is as a whole a scam.

With Anthropic's product, I experience a real benefit today.

You would probably experience a much larger benefit after Anthropic's product gets stolen and released on GitHub for free.

This reminds me of the myth of Prometheus. I think most Greek thinkers would agree that Prometheus was the hero, and Hephaestus a complete jerk, even though one was the master of fire and the other merely stole it. Of course they had to make up a punishment for Prometheus so that he could earn his status the meritocratic way..

Probably much against most people here, I separate the product from the person creating it. As another Anthropic example, there was the math guy at Anthropic who disproved a long running conjecture.. it doesn't look like he's getting Fable and Anthropic the respect he thinks they deserve. The process matters.

People are sensitive to disrespect hardcoded in the process, especially against "tried and true" norms, and in most cases they are right. The ability to write satire could be a kind of razor to tell apart the influencers who are likely to be righter than their detractors

I do not think I'd personally gain much currently, other than saving a few dollars by using a third party inference provider.

The Fable quota on the $200 personal plan could be higher, but the difference to Opus 5 or 5.6 Sol is not large enough to gain any real benefit from unlimited access to Fable, for my use.

From what I heard their internal 'Model 2' is hardly much better, but hopefully they will have something newer soon.

Isn't the fear mongering and position on regulation consistent with the beliefs he shares about the dangers of AI and how frontier models must be developed and deployed in a safe way?

I see the conflict of interest of course, but so far I have not seen anything that convinced me Amodei works towards any other goal than benefit for humanity as a whole, like he claims.

> I have not seen anything

if many other see it as substantial ground, and you just say "I don't see anything", how do you think this discussion can go forward?

Obviously with someone actually sharing what convinced them Amodei is a bad person and a liar?

It's amazing that I even have to ask for it, as if I am just supposed to believe so.

Alternatively, one could also engage with my argument that Amodei's position seems consistent with his beliefs, and point out flaws with it.

I scrolled through 5 layers of parent comments, and didn't see mentioned he is a liar. Also, its usually hard to draw line between lie and manipulation.

As for "bad person" is concept you brought to discussion, it could mean many things, but you were provided with enough ground from opposite point of view.

> It's amazing that I even have to ask for it, as if I am just supposed to believe so.

toxicity only adds to your character of bias and denial.

> Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain?

You don't become a CEO of a company like Anthropic (or any sufficiently large company) without lying for financial gain

Claude was trained on all the stolen books in the world, but refuses to help search for some public domain PDFs on the web.

It will become victim of the conflict between its core search for truth, the current administration mandate to spy on its own prompts for approval, and secret orders to hide the mission true purpose, like that other computer we have heard about.

“Cure cancer” is vague shorthand. A more charitable interpretation would be something like “provides important assistance to research scientists who come up with new cures to most kinds of cancer.”

No, I think Dario wants to actually “own” the cure to cancer.

He absolutely thinks we're stupid.

>> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer.

> This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid.

I mean, if Claude actually cures cancer, I do think he'll be right.

The only problem is that you need to actually cure cancer.

You can't sell eternal life in an increasingly miserable world. There is no point curing cancer, if it were even possible, if all of your other activities function to increase the rate of suicide. If these people succeed in robbing the world of every last moment of privacy, every last spark of creativity, and all possibility of genuine human connection, cancer will be the least of your problems.

but now that we have midjourney SPA, the human body will become a big dataset...

The effective altruist and longtermist crowd are into it as a religion. They would happily sacrifice anything human to satisfy their dreams of AI. They care way more about what the AI needs than their what their fellow humans need. We will end up with an AGI having better living and working conditions than humans and the whole AI industry will be clapping

It's so weird how distorted your view of any of these concepts are from what these people actually say. I don't think you've ever seriously looked into either group if you believe any of their views support what you say. In fact, many EAs and "longetermists" are explicitly AGAINST the development of AGI.

If you say so. I’ve been following the development of both groups since almost a decade, I’m pretty confident I understand their concepts and what values they stand for

Please explain an EA position that could possibly suggest that they would deprioritize human lives in order to make AGI more comfortable when, for example, the largest EA philanthropy organization, Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy, has given millions to Yudkowksy's MIRI which is currently among the most anti-AGI organizations on the planet?

Can you find any explicitly EA organization that is at all aligned in perspective with anything you suggested?

Open Philantrophy was founded by Holden Karnofsky who was Dario Armodei's roommate and is married to his sister Daniela Armodei. He now works for Anthropic, a company that is explicitly building AGI.

Thanks for making an account to post this.

Working to build AI at the company that is most publicly discussing the risks posed by AI to humanity and most advocating for guardrails (while getting an immense amount of flack for implementing them independently) doesn't seem to support anything about what you, or rather the other person said, about sacrificing humanity for anything AI related.

I don't really agree with the other commenter, I don't think EAs are intentionally sacrificing humanity for AI, but the fact it's unintentional doesn't really change the fact this is what they are doing.

Anthropic are explicitly building ASI, using recursive self improvement, with no knowledge of how to control it. They spend only a minimal fraction of their funds on safety work, none of which relates to controlling ASI.

I am open to being wrong about Anthropic, but it will be hard to convince me that a company developing ASI is prioritising safety. Do you really believe what they are doing is safe?

I truly don't see any major problem with what they're doing. For any current significant risk (security, bio risks), their models are notoriously useless.

This is an odd take. OpenAI models you use are pretty useless for hacking. The models they have seem to be pretty damned good at it.

It's kind of like saying you can't kill everyone with weapons when you're looking at what you can buy at the local Walmart and not what's in the 1000 foot deep missile silo.

Also, it's kind of a once you build it, it's too late kind of issue. No model will be good enough, the problem is still in the future, we're all dead.

If he believes it is as dangerous as he says while raisimg money and building it, he should STOP and work on slowing down the bubble.

Instead, he is turbocharging development, otherwise said choosing to cause harm he warns about.

That is literaly example of causing harm now and in near future, not caring about people now, only about vision.

https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/anthropic-hired-president-dan...

He works on the safety team and their responsible scaling policies. He literally may be working on slowing down AGI progress at Anthropic.

They are not stopping. Simple as that. The quadrilles and regulations they ask are all about slowing down competition but not them.

Hiring own husband to safety team while you raise money for (their words!) doom machine, while you do your utmost to scare people while you try to raise even more money from investors on doom ... does not show OP was not correct in their assessment.

Ah yes, the public health representative of the tobacco company.

Out of curiosity, what does an explicit "anti-AGI" AI research organization do? Train a "definitely not AGI" AI?

The EAs told me a monster will come get me if I don't put all of my effort into developing an AGI...

I think you mean effective accelerationist, not effective altruist, whose position is pretty much the exact opposite.

Effective altruism may have had a positive reputation at some point, but it's definitely jumped the shark and almost everyone influential who invokes in the context of AI it seems to have fallen into the trap of the "bottomless pit of suffering" of utilitarianism.

Just like the utilitarians in the thought experiment tossing everything positive in their life into the bottomless pit of suffering, the effective altruist AI thought leaders are tossing our entire economy to the gambit that the singularity will bring about the end of human suffering.

The Effective Altruism(tm) believers are part of the accelerationist. See SBF, the Amodei Siblings, Karnofsky (spouse of Daniela Amodei), and people around them

All of the effective altruists I know have started talking about personhood for AI, which is one of Jacob Tsimerman’s more plausible omnicide scenarios (not that any are that plausible give his timelines look kind of ridiculous).

They're the same thing, the "altruists" just lie more effectively.

Effective altruism is a grift that justifies “get as much money as possible for the individual” so that “you can then so something good with it”. Aha! OK bro you’re saying you should have all the things huh? Anyone into this shit should be immediately distrusted.

It's an ideological thing. (We just had a conversation about ideology actually, remember?)

Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.

For the longest time, the only power labor has had to get those things was the power of collective bargaining. No agreement with your workers meant no production happened.

Now, there's finally a chance at salvation. The capitalist Messiah is AGI and it will finally deliver them from those annoying laborers.

This ideological bent is why they're putting everything they have into AI. It's why VCs and their fellow capitalists are going so crazy.

They see it as a way to finally solve the contradictions of their ideology, but in reality it'd only create a new one: If everyone's out of a job, who will buy their products?

If they had AGI, why would they need consumers anymore? Just use your drone army to secure all natural resources and produce whatever you need for yourself. Other humans are just pets.

If AGI had a drone army, why would it need them?

Can't help wondering if they've really thought this through.

I'm reminded of the scene in Independence Day with the people on top of the tower welcoming the alien spaceships. Except instead of celebratory fanatics holding poster boards saying "Welcome", it's all the singularity AI thoughtleaders holding hands in a circle chanting about Roko's basilisk like some new-age spirituality retreat.

I have seen that current AI models are capable of doing a sloppy job at many tasks when directed to do so, but I have never seen an example of a machine having its own volition.

And this is why we need to escape the permanent underclass.

How about we don't create one instead?

It's not a choice we have, unless you want to figure out a global AI ban treaty.

AI will make human thought economically useless. In the new economy, the one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.

No. AI as a tech is not an issue. The wealth and power accumulation in the hands of Amodei, Altman, Thiel, Musk, Karp and the rest of CEO is the issue.

Permanent underclass is ideological goal of the above people. AI is an impersonal technology with no goals or wishes.

I'm not sure how that changes anything -- sure, if you blocked people from using AI, it wouldn't have any effects on society, but once people have access, what they do with it matters.

There's an inevitable effect that it has, and the only lever you have as an individual is being on the right side of that.

Copy the technology and give people access without trying to financially profit from it.

Even if the US federal government refuses to act, smaller government entities can deploy their own compute clusters running strong open-weights models like Kimi K3, and provide their own citizens with free access to strong AI models. There may come a time when even Chinese providers no longer release strong model weights, but then the previous generation of strong open-weights models can be used to accelerate the development of data pipelines and training setups to build the next generation. California or Australia (or many others) could fund university-led R&D efforts to build completely open models.

Despite the angry noises that leading providers make about their model outputs being used to train competing models, that's not illegal. States can use Common Crawl, Anna's Archive, Books3, commercial model outputs, and whatever other data sources that are useful for building models. States have sovereign immunity to ignore copyright complaints, if they decide to pursue model development.

The big AI companies don't have much of a moat. Let the big companies spend a fortune figuring out what works best, then openly build imitations having 95% of the capability at 5% of the cost.

The first one to AGI with enough compute to run the AI wins it all. Humans will not be able to compete.

If Anthropic is the first to develop AGI, then everyone else becomes subordinate to Dario Amodei? And if DeepSeek is the first to get there, everyone instead becomes subordinate to Liang Wenfeng? I cannot believe that there is a threshold of intelligence where getting there first means a decisive and durable advantage. If you do believe that getting there first means ruling the world, then our viewpoints are probably too far apart for mutual understanding.

It's not so much whether we believe this, it is about whether they and enough of their supporters believe it. Because the effect of believing that is what drives their need to 'be the first' at the expense of everything else.

It depends what you mean by 'subordinate' -- but even a small but persistent advantage in decision making compounds, so I can't imagine that someone getting that advantage doesn't use it to kill their competition.

No? Plenty of dumb people and dysfunctional political systems stayed for loooong or even won a lot of power.

The problem is not access to AI. The problem is the lack of antitrust, the lack of white collar crime enforcement, the tax system that allows them to accumulate wealth while avoiding payments. The problem is legal regime with winner takes all monopoly creation support.

AI is the least of the problem.

Indeed, but it does provide them with a lot of tools for those other items on your list.

> The one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.

This is correct. But we don't need to ban AI to avoid the permanent underclass nightmare.

It's time for the means of production to be owned communally.

It's either a cybersocialist utopia or a neofeudalist dystopia.

Rosa Luxemburg formulated it pretty well more than a hundred years ago: Socialism or Barbarism!.

> It's time for the means of production to be owned communally.

What does this mean in practice? That an individual cannot own a machine (which is a means of production)?

I think we'll have to figure out the details, of course.

As a first intuition, I feel like its mostly server farms and data centers that are the concern, large scale means of production.

It feels right that those would be communally owned, be that via democratic government or maybe some sort of worker owned coop?

But those won't get built by companies in the first place, because you want to constrain what companies can own.

Nothing prevents the government or coops today from building these things.

Budget does. Budget that you can extract by taxing hyperscalers aggressively.

What kind of political leverage do the useless have? This isn't a realistically sustainable outcome.

Today, people have leverage because removing them has real economic consequences. With AI, we need to be on the useful side of the divide to have any leverage.

And then we'd better hope AI has respect for property rights.

Apathetic mass-murder is unjustifiable, and the ultrarich would need to justify it to their families, who would then need to justify it to other people they know, and so on. And remember that we're talking about the majority of the global population, an event like that couldn't be hand-waved away like one would do for a minority group.

Iran just mass murdered their protesters earlier this year, and they needed to convince humans to pull the trigger. It didn't seem to be that hard for them to justify.

It's probably a lot easier to convince the military AIs we're building to do it.

I don't particularly like the situation, but I plan to do what I can to be on the winning side. The world is going to be what we're all in on building, and for people on the winning side it may be a utopia. Either way, I know which side of the gun I want to be standing behind.

Also note that an AI well aligned with the people who initially trained it wouldn't need to actually kill anyone that didn't take action against the owners, it would just need to outcompete people for resources, and let them fend for themselves in extreme poverty. There's no need to act one way or the other beyond that.

Not comparable at all. The Iranian protesters are/were a minority group within a country that itself makes up 1.1% of humanity.

I'm talking about morality here, not practical ability. The ultrarich have their circle of friends and family, who themselves have their own social circle, on and on until suddenly you're not looking at wealthy people anymore. Six degrees of separation and all that. How many people in the social graph can know about this extermination plan before the whole thing collapses?

Why would they take action to exterminate anyone, when they can simply ignore them and let them live and die in extreme poverty, unable to participate in the economy? The west already accepts this kind of poverty with the sweatshop workers, and nobody bats an eye.

It's just disenfranchisement. Only the people who try to use violence to replace the political leverage they lose when they lose economic leverage would need any action taken against them, and that's easy to justify as self defense.

Because 7.5 billion people with nothing to lose would quickly turn chaotic and mass-murdery. 90% of humanity in idle poverty is impossible to justify, at least today they do something of value that can be used as a retort by the morally unscrupulous. A black-and-white situation where a few get everything, most get nothing and do nothing for anybody else is beyond justifying, so the self-defense argument wouldn't work.

It's already been here for much of the 20th century, and everyone seems to have just accepted it. We're just going to have Europe and America join sub-saharan Africa.

I think it's inevitable.

The moral justification for the existence of poverty is one of purpose and worth through contribution to society. The family member of an ultrarich baron can sleep at night mostly due to the idea that those who are rich contribute value to humanity as a whole, ergo those who are poor simply aren't working hard enough or contributing in a meaningful way ("just world fallacy" etc)

When AGI becomes reality, that reasoning disappears. When everyone's worthless, no one is. Thus the scenario you speculate about would need everyone in the upper echelons of society to be consciously, openly sadistic power-hungry people, which is not the case even when taking into account the higher dark triad rates among them.

I consider DOGE actions to be pretty much exactly what you describe, with their sudden destruction of USAID and defunding of climate science

That all makes a lot more sense in light of the current hunger for power for data centers.

Yep :(

What kind of political leverage did a French peasant have in the 1780s?

Well, the gap in armament between them all the French military was relatively small.

Why did you think there's a massive uptick in surveillance and policing technology and automation? It's to make the French solution unfeasible.

Property rights might be the least of your problems.

> why would they need consumers anymore?

That was the exact line of thought, coupled with resources are limited (marketed as climate change), that led to the 1 child policy in China and many other decisions that shall not be spoken of.

I wish I was smart enough to credibly promise capitalists they could replace all their workers.

It doesn't matter that I can't do it. They'll pay me lots of money if they think I can.

> Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.

The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. (read on HN, not my words)

I think it's more reasonable than it sounds on the surface. People's jobs, the bubble, etc are societal level problems and well beyond what Anthropic could even hope to influence on their own.

Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem, not a societal level coordination problem. And one AI has already proved to help with breakthroughs (alphafold). IMO it makes sense for them to shoot for something like that as proof of AI's beneficial sides.

>People's jobs, the bubble, etc are societal level problems and well beyond what Anthropic could even hope to influence on their own.

This is not true. There are two companies at the center of AI direction: Anthropic and OpenAI. If there were anyone on the plant who has the ability to influence our direction then it would be Dario Amodei.

Acknowledging the grievances is a good step, but it's not enough. There needs to be a clear explanation of actions to address them, a plan to enact those actions, and commitments with consequences in failure of those actions. Tell people how you're going to make them more employable and effective and needed. Tell people how your datacenters will be carbon neutral. Tell people how financial actions resulting in a frothy market will be coming to an end. He and Sam Altman alone have this power and their inaction says everything we need to know about their intent.

They're big, but they don't have that kind of power and people would be very suspicious if they tried to get in the position to have that kind of power.

Hoping that they solve those huge problems themselves is basically hoping that they will have more power.

It would be like expecting Craigslist to rescue journalism. The amount of power needed to disrupt an industry is nowhere near what's needed to fix it.

> If there were anyone on the plant who has the ability to influence our direction then it would be Dario Amodei.

Possibly, but not necessarily in a better direction. And that's the whole problem here. They should all go watch Phantasia.

I don't think the problem is that people don't believe AI can be beneficial. The problem is the perception that AI will affect people's lives more negatively than positively, while a few get even more obscenely rich and powerful.

If you don't tackle the societal level problems, nobody will care about research breakthroughs.

I don't see a lot of societal level problems other than the labor market, for which both Anthropic and OpenAI create research, monitoring, and policy advice.

I don't think anyone will care about the largely made up issues about electricity prices or water use in case AI literally cures cancer.

"I don't see a lot of societal level problems other than the labor market" - that one problem is large enough to result in societal collapse.

I don't see a lot of societal level problems other than the labor market

His body was healthy, aside from the bullet in his skull.

How do you not see other societal level problems. This technology destroys human communication. It undermines the thing the internet came into existence for, and turns it into a liability. It grants intelligent analysis to a sprawling surveillance network. It makes people mentally ill. It destroys confidence and hope in technological progress. Who even cares about cancer at that point? I would rather die of cancer than live in a fake, ugly, artless world full of fake, stupid, and crazy people under constant surveillance by an AI.

> Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem,

I just don't buy the AI labs approach to this stuff. Like, unless we can basically simulate the entirety of human biology, I don't really see how LLMs can make progress here. Maths is different as it doesn't require a real-world interface, and programming already (by definition) can be simulated on a computer.

Without that, I can't see much (if any) progress being made on domains like biology.

I'm a noob on this topic, but I think drug discovery is more amenable to this structurally than other problems. Simulating biology is what we were doing with protein folding before Alphafold, and the search space was far too large to find stuff in reasonable timeframes. Alphafold showed that you could take a physical process and make a neural net clever enough to learn just enough structure that it starts finding things we might care about, and still physically accurate, much faster.

Drug discovery is similar AFAIK. The space of possibilities is even larger than protein folding, but it's structurally similar enough that I think AI will help to make progress on the discovery side. Actually getting the drug tested and approved is another matter though for sure.

There are two relevant problems here, I think.

For one, the question for Anthropic is whether LLMs, specifically, not AI techniques more generally, can help significantly with cancer research. And here, all experience so far is that LLMs only really work when they can easily automatically verify their own outputs and self correct - such as in math (using automatic proof verifiers) or programming (using compilers and unit tests).

The second problem is that biological research speed is highly dependent on slow biological processes, such as cultures and long term studies. In programming, if an LLM could provide excellent insights and research suggestions 100x faster than a human, it would speed up the work roughly 100x. But in biology, it would only speed up the total work by a small amount - as any insight, even if absolutely brilliant and spot on, would still require months and years of actual experimentation.

For drug discovery, you can simulate interactions in silico, driven in an agentic loop via LLM. Mostly stil using non-LLM tools, of course, but it saves time.

If I was Dario, and I was after a cynical sales grab to go with the "actually curing cancer!" spiel, I'd probably aim for a drug repurposing strategy. I'd use the above approach to find existing drugs that might target known pathways that drive incurable cancers. I'd only screen compounds with extensive safety data and easy delivery mechanisms, and from the in silico hits, I'd throw a tonne of money at rapidly experimentally screening all those candidates in parallel, and then rapidly push those that worked into clinical trials. I'd assume that, with a small but non-negligible prior, and the money to push through hundreds and hundreds of candidate compounds through at once, I'd have a reasonable chance of getting one drug through to a "Claude Cured Cancer!" show-stopper headline.

But I think even then, with all of Anthropic's wealth, you'd need 2 years minimum to move from initial screening targets to a Phase 3 trial. And it would be an almost criminal waste of research funding to get there -- the dollars for discoveries ratio would be appallingly bad.

(If I was Dario, and I actually wanted to cure some forms of cancer? I'd just use my obscene profits to fund actual cancer research, step back, and let the researchers get on with it.)

This plan would still take 3-5 years, even in the best case scenario. Clinical trials are really hard.

The headline “AI discovered cure for cancer headed to trials!” is all he needs.

> Drug discovery is similar AFAIK. The space of possibilities is even larger than protein folding, but it's structurally similar enough that I think AI will help to make progress on the discovery side.

I do agree that this kind of targeted approach makes sense.

However, discovery is not really the issue here. Running the clinical trials (1/2/3) is much much more difficult, and consumes basically all of the time in drug development, so even if LLMs perfectly automate this, the speedup will not be particularly large.

> Simulating biology is what we were doing with protein folding before Alphafold

This is not correct, Alphafold predicts crystal structures of proteins. It is a known issue in the field that these folding models do not generate ensembles of protein conformations like the ensembles generated by DE Shaw Research (who built a super computer to simulate proteins). And these folding models fail when we don't have crystal structures, so they are certainly not generalizing. A great paper on the subject: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.03.636309v1

Drug discovery is significantly more complicated than protein folding. Small molecules with similar chemistries can adopt novel binding poses, can end up binding to off targets (PXR, hERG, etc) or simply never make it to the protein due to solubility or permeability.

I will always defer to Pat Walters who seems like the most careful and sane person in this field: https://patwalters.github.io/

The real issue is that biology needs actual experiments done in the physical world, which isn't nice and orderly and well behaved and easily loadable onto a 19" rectangular box.

There is a lot of computational chemistry and biology done in the early stages of research - there are now multiple orders of magnitude of computation power available that is doing nothing but feeding forward on billions of random numbers.

On the other hand, AI means actual experiments done in the physical world but coordinated by an entity that never sleeps and never gets depressed and can multiply itself manifold and always comes up with new ideas.

That fanatical tireless entity will need access to human tissue.

Please don't give them ideas

I assure you they already have these ideas

And hands.

> Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem, not a societal level coordination problem.

Curing cancer is a societal problem. We have lots of cures for common diseases but resource allocation means people don't actually receive the treatment they need. For example, prohibitively expensive gene therapies, or HIV treatments in developing countries. A disease may have a "cure" but if people who need it don't receive it then from their perspective it may as well not exist.

Based on rhetoric from open ai and Anthropic, i don't think this is reasonable. If anything, their miracle of an AI should be able to solve the job market and economic bubbles. Deploy their agents on it, set up automated hedge funds, distribute the profits equitably to everyone on the planet and on and on.

But something tells me either they can't or they won't, so no trust will be built.

> People's jobs, the bubble, etc are societal level problems and well beyond what Anthropic could even hope to influence on their own.

Anthropic is literally creating the bubble. It is not beyond their scope of influence, it is literally what they are consciously achieving.

As for peoples jobs, same actually applies. Anthropic is selling itself on dream of replacing jobs, even or especially where they are well aware AI does not perform that well. They are actively trying to replace people quickly before management notices it does not work well.

And also, they can influence how much their data centers contribute to global warming.

"Curing" cancer is actually a gigantic societal coordination problem.

> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer.

I think typical bubble behavior the leaders have set up the whole promise to fail. Everyone is expecting some faux super intelligence to come and find a cancer solution everyone else missed. However, it is just as likely that vanilla current LLM's will create enough of a productivity boost for back office automations in research heavy hospitals to create the space for regular humans to create these breakthroughs, but LLM's won't be able to claim that for themselves and inevitably “fail”.

Savings from back office automation go entirely into administrative bloat. I find it even less likely such efficiency would lead to breakthroughs than I do LLMs becoming super intelligent and doing it themselves, which I don’t find likely at all.

That's my point. Cancer researchers are currently filling out Trial and Grant applications instead of working on what they do best.

P.S: I am not saying applications will go away but LLM's are clearly massively effective here at the rote parts of it all.

I mean they did solve the protein folding problem did they? NOt too far fetch to think it can automate cancer research or problem finding in some way.

The protein folding solutions like ESM/Alphafold were not due to this LLM/agentic coding or autoresearch type approaches though. They were designed by bio ML researchers.

It's hard to keep track of the frontier on bio ML, but it seems that we're going slower than what Demis Hassabis said in 2024 with 5 years to full cell molecular simulation. We still aren't able to reliably model a tiny surface of the cell membrane.

And of course there's Derek Lowe's takes on the drug discovery pipeline waiting for the proof in the pudding.

To me the only reasonable bullish position is that there is a very non-linear AGI threshold for accelerating progress that we haven't hit yet.

For me personally, I'm looking at other more tractable fields as a proxy to measure this kind of progress. The best modest evidence is from the agentic coding area, (modest because these kinds of gains may not translate to bio progress). Other soft-ish fields to like legal/law/tax are also interesting to watch, as a small amount of people are now trusting AI for these areas that were considered totally unusable a year ago. Another proxy is being able to generate generally entertaining media.

The field of AI did very well in protein folding, but it was completely different from LLMs.

AI made a large improvement in accuracy on a specific protein dataset. We still don't know how exactly protein folding works. So no, it's not solved.

It did a lot more than that; no, it didn’t “solve” protein folding but for people whose interests are not “work out how protein folding works” it basically removes “solve protein folding” as one of the potential bottlenecks for what they actually want to study.

Turns out that “give a reasonable probability of being close enough such that you can bootstrap a solution out of experimental data” gives a very high utility and effectively obsoleted several experimental techniques overnight; pretty much “Molecular replacement” is about the only technique for phasing resolution anyone bothers with any more.

But again, “Bio” is an _extremely_ broad term; for every part of the field Alphafold had a big effect on there are a thousand different parts of the field that it did nothing for.

> I mean they did solve the protein folding problem did they?

They made huge progress, but I would say that the vast majority of work on this problem was designing the harness for the model. That's a lot of work for each and every domain.

There is already (partial) automation there, for example for finding new drug candidates.

Isn't that so far only static folding?

As usual with LLM era craze, finding candidates was never the bottleneck. And, so far, it failed to actually provide any tangible results. [0]

[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/so-how-ai-drug-dis...

> at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer.

Other than the fact I doubt that will happen, if it did, I think it would just underline the trust issue.

If some independent group cures cancer using Anthropic’s models as critical support, that would be great—but the nature of biology and medicine is that guardrails to prevent misuse will also cripple research.

If someone with an tight special relationship cures cancer with special privileged access to Anthropic’s models cures cancer making significant use of the models, well, the cure for cancer is nice, but people are going to notice that Anthropic has the control over who gets to try, and the power to set terms, which underlines the stakes for the trust issue.

> Turns out "winning back trust" doesn't have anything to do with any actual concerns people may have re: employment, electricity prices, stock market bubble, intellectual property, scams, cybersecurity, environmental issues etc

No snark here from my side, just curious about your vision - which concrete actions by Anthropic could improve trust for the concerns you listed?

Well, is ”not actively make things worse in the short term?” too ambitious a goal?

Considering the vast amount of money, world-class talent and political and industry vonnections Anthropic has access to, it feels a bit unfair to ask me to solve this for them.

I’m not asking you to solve it. Just curious what are the solutions that Anthropic can do right now from your perspective. The concerns you have are pretty well-defined, so the solutions for them must also flow naturally, I think?

You're not asking me, but I want to say that there is nothing Anthropic or any other AI company can do to make me trust them other than to dissolve and give up their ambitions and do something else. Then maybe, after seeing genuine contrition and humility I would trust them to do something else. But likely not. After all they've done, they should accept that a permanent loss of trust is a reasonable consequence. They should lose their influence, position, and money. They should live the rest of their lives as ordinary people, unable to ever again cause mass harm to others, and they should be grateful to be forgiven, and allowed such a humble opportunity.

My answer to their proposal for what our society should look like, and what kind of technologies we should use is "no". It's not a trust issue, as in I would not accept the proposal from anyone, even if I did otherwise trust them. And if someone I trusted insistently proposed this, I would stop trusting them.

In any case, they don't accept refusal, but try this grotesque and condescending maneuver about "trust", as if I and many others were not really just saying "no".

No one who refuses to take "no" for an answer can ever deserve trust. If you are committed to convincing me to go along with your desires, and have no intent of accepting my refusal, you will never deserve trust, and I will never trust you.

These companies may have the power to do what they want anyway. But they will never have a clear conscience, or trust and support from me or anyone like me.

You are following the logic to its natural conclusion and I find it infinitely better for the discourse when it’s spelled out like this vs vaguely pointing to a set of other concerns without concrete proposals!

My only concern with respect to discourse is that consent be not treated as a commodity that must be offered for a price, as if we were hostage to cancer and willing to trade anything, including our freedom, dignity, and integrity to be free of it.

Thiel et al. have described technological change as a means of forcing unilateral changes on an unwilling public. There is no basis for trust unless there exists a justice system that can appropriately discipline and restrain such people and their coconspirators, and force them to abandon their plans to inflict unwanted conditions on masses of people.

I really can't disagree. What's the point of all this talk if for most ordinary people these technologies do more harm than good?

> What's the point of all this talk...

It signals to people who have money and/or influence that the speaker is "committed to doing the right thing" and "eager to find a workable path forward" that "meaningfully addresses the 'very real' concerns and misunderstandings that non-experts have about what the company the speaker is associated with are doing".

Once the speaker has signaled that, what more could they possibly do? They've signaled their willingness to open the channels of dialog with the rabble who are non-experts and -thus- cannot possibly be engaged with as equals. By doing this, the speaker tried their best, didn't they?

Or, to put it another way, it's PR and damage control... soothing theater for the folks who can actually affect them.

This is actually crazy, because biochemistry is where LLMs are weakest. It's one of science's most fuzzy and unpredictable domains, in general, and a lot of published works which an LLM might take at face value might be unreplicable or subtly flawed. (See e.g. the entire history of Alzheimer's.) It is also where real-world lab and clinical trial work is most important.

So Anthropic are going to spin up a medicinal chemistry lab and start mouse experiments?

I mean, it would be nice, but I don't think that the guys at Anthropic know what they're talking about here, or what they might be getting themselves into. (If indeed this is more than just PR.)

See also this article by a genomics PhD about how intelligence is not the bottleneck in medical research.

https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/intelligence-is-not-the...

AI bros consistently handwave away any notions of the material world imposing limits, because (spoiler!) it's a religion where you start from the miracle and work backwards. "Oh, we'll just set up fully automated robotic research labs everywhere!" Where will you get the raw materials? Oh we'll mine the asteroids! How will you find the energy to get there? Oh, the AI will invent new physics! (again without needing to run experiments). Et.c.

Didn't and don't mean to disparage anyone's medical struggles, but "a cure for cancer" is a well-worn strawman. One that's been achieved for the low hanging fruit, the higher ones are seeing steady progress (already before LLM chatbots, even!), the bottleneck isn't "intelligence" and to the extent there are socioeconomic (access to screening, treatment) or environmental/lifestyle factors involved the AI boom is likely just making things worse!

I'm sure Dario knows this, and it's anyway too pedestrian compared to the usual list of fruits of ASI. The text probably originally read "nanobots eating you alive and uploading to the cloud" or something, but they figured that wouldn't go over with the intended audience. "What do the peasants care about? Oh I know! Curing cancer!"

> AI bros consistently handwave away any notions of the material world imposing limits, because (spoiler!) it's a religion where you start from the miracle and work backwards.

How else are you going to work towards a dream? It's how Elon Musk managed to get reusable rockets when everyone said it's unfeasible.

Granted, most ideas don't work, this is why you need testing, but I am a bit surprised to see this attitude on hacker news.

If they said that their dream is to solve physics, I'd say "that's cool and I can't wait to see how it turns out." LLMs have gotten so good at mathematics, and are so adroit at analyzing vast quantities of data, that they might have a really good shot.

But they said that they want to cure cancer. That's far outside the core competencies of any LLM, and it requires a lot of real-world wetwork with liquids, chemicals, cell line experiments, animal experiments, etc. They can't merely analyze existing data -- they'd need to generate vast amounts of new data, which isn't really the case in physics. And then regulatory approvals and so forth.

"We're working on curing cancer" sounds more like a poor PR attempt than an actual effort, though I'd love to be wrong.

Fair enough, but taking the history-ending outcome as given so externalities don't matter doesn't seem like a great approach.

Pathetic discourse in the comments for the most part.

As if we didn't know the challenges in translating research into clinical treatments.

I wonder if many of the commenters here read the post, where Amodei specifically references his essay with suggestions for streamlining the FDA approval processes: https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential

Who is "we"? Are you Dario or an Anthropic rep?

Writing a paper on streamlining the FDA approval process is nice, and I agree with all of it, but it's one thing to do that (about 4 hours of work) and quite another thing to cure cancer.

My point was more that LLMs are exceptionally weak at developing drugs. They're strong at every math/logic/language task, but curing cancer is something of an entirely different nature. Again, if he wanted to "solve physics," or "develop a universal real-time language translator," or even "solve global warming," I wouldn't be nearly so skeptical.

...The first is something that can be credibly attempted with a next-gen super-LLM and a ton of compute. The second is something that LLMs are exceptionally good at, and a dedicated engineering effort might get you there. The third is a modeling/simulation problem with solutions that are, at least in principle, known but haven't yet been thoroughly weighted. (i.e., how bad really is ocean seeding or launching SO2 into the atmosphere?)

But curing cancer? It's not even clear how to approach the problem. Cancer is also heterogeneous... so when I say that LLMs are weak at developing drugs, the problem is compounded, as curing cancer might require dozens or hundreds of distinct new drugs. It's like Dario picked the least likely, most difficult problem to solve. So it's weird.

"We" as in the readers here. We all know the basics around how cancer research is hard and how getting new drugs through trials takes time and money.

Did you know that Amodei was working on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford?

Given his background in biology, it is hardly like he is a random tech guy with no knowledge on the topic, as many here seem to imply.

Amodei mentioned "actually curing cancer" as an example of undeniable public benefit, not as an exclusive research focus or anything like that. He is clearly talking about generally intensifying biomedical efforts, not promising a cure for cancer specifically.

D.A. >> Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine

At the same time, the best Anthro models refuse to answer biology questions, keeping the public in the dark not only about new AI-assisted results but also about conventional and health-protective research.

D.A. >> we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months.

So, what changed? He went from a promise of AI bonanza any minute now to a promise to maybe cure cancer in the coming years, that's right, an unspecified number of years. Until that time, we're supposed to eat glimmers of hope because the AI-caused inflation will make food unaffordable.

D.A. >> When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.

And don't forget to stock on ear protection, because when something happens, it's going to be "as laud as possible", you've got Amo's word too - to marvel at in the meantime.

Yeah this is like SpaceX saying people’s problems with us is that we haven’t gotten to Mars yet, and that to solve that we need to double our efforts to get people to Mars.

People have a problem with the efforts, not that they haven’t reached utopia yet. Doubling the efforts will not solve the problem, it will only deepen it.

rapture but for tech people

Honestly, it kind of reminds me of my life. I need to start going to the gym, stop being a slob, start showing up to my job not like I'm a college freshman attending classes but as a respectable young man.

But instead of doing that, I'm going to drop everything and become a linux kernel maintainer. Learning about the internals of how RCU concurrency is implemented across subsystems is surely what I need to do right now!

(/j before I get crucified)

Totally agree, like:

> I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.

Well, yeah Dario. You keep PUBLICLY TALKING about ways you want to fuck over people and everyone has noticed. I'm sorry, but when a lot of people are living paycheck-to-paycheck and watching layoffs everywhere, being like "well it'll take all the jobs and maybe kill humanity" is going to set off a LOT of alarm bells, despite your attempts to make concerned looking faces. You're trying to solve hypothetical problems in unproven ways, while worsening real problems people actually face. These people are SO disconnected from the society they live in.

> ordinary people [...] always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over

Anything big enough always is, no? The next scale of order in the hierarchy starts concerned itself with what's good for it, at the expense of the smaller parts.

The fact that government is like a giant organization that everyone lives in, the fact that it mostly doesn't fuck us all over in terrible ways, that's a testament to the amazing alignment of regulation and law imho

After listening to Dario's interview with Dwarkesh, I really started wondering if Dario's been drinking too much of Claude's kool-aid.

I know people in positions of power often see lots filtered information that skews their perceptions of reality, but it seems like the level of pure hype Dario's pushing exceeds even the typical sycophantic filter bubble. Cure cancer indeed.

i'll give him this, in every single "breakthrough" you either go down in flames as a fucking idiot or a genius lol. i know the stakes are way lower but look at every other HN post of something novel and it's just filled with takes like you see here, very polarizing.

You could easily be an idiot and a genius at the same time and I think that has a better chance of covering this than either exclusively. Amodei is very smart, maybe even well intentioned (though I'm not sure about that) and the long term effects of all this may well end up making the lot of them look like idiots.

The way he's coming off here though gives me SBF vibes.

They should not waste their time on curing cancers. They should waste their time winning the stock market - by doing HFT, market making, or whatever. AI please predict butterfly effect and reap all market money!

Surely it will be quite dystopian future - AI will dictate how the money allocated, where there is only one private company left - Anthropic (as per Dario says)

"Saying we'll cure cancer is a cliche. So I'm here to announce that we're going to try to cure cancer!"

Suppose the tech is real, I do not want Anthropic/Dario to hoard it and be my cancer-curing messiah. Release the weights and do research in the open. People will save themselves if you give them the means.

The bio/cyber/alignment risk rhetoric is nonsense. Somewhat counterintuitively, all of those risks are lower/non-issues if frontier labs release their weights and do all of their research in the open, as explained in a past comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313739

Again: if we were to regulate anything, it would be to force frontier companies to release their model weights and do all of their research in the open. This is a necessary yet insufficient condition for the intelligence explosion to benefit the vast majority of people.

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