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Comment by mhaberl | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

1. He is giving his word that if he cures cancer, he will brag about it as loudly as possible. Admirable dude! I actually trust him on this 100%

2. “We hope to have incredible results” -> doesn’t everybody hope to have incredible results?

3. “Some early glimmers in the coming months” -> is that planned for a few days before the IPO?

This guy says less than politicians do.

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> We hope to have incredible results

He hasn't learned the correct speak yet. He should instead say that he is _very confident_ that they will cure cancer until the end of the year.

Really, guys, learn from Musk, he is the master of promising everything, but not actually committing to anything.

Trump had "concepts of a plan", so it appears that both ends of the vagueness spectrum work.

> This guy says less than politicians do.

This is a good thing cause all politicians lie all the time :)

As do CEOs. My impression is that in the absence of significant selection pressure to weed it out, this strategy is quite effective for gaining power and influence, and that such pressure is at an all time low right now

People lie all the time.

When people in power lie, it lowers trust in all society. I don’t want to live in a low-trust society, so I am against lying by CEOs and politicians.

Agreed, but that doesn't change the fact that people lie in general.

Most people start lying long before they reach any position of power and in many cases, lying is exaclyt how they got there. That's what makes it hard to fix: by the time someone is in power, the behavior has already been rewarded and is already doing a snowball effect. I'm not defending it (especially in Politics, it shouldn't be legal), just acknowledging reality that people lie about tiny things, so of course they lie about big things. It's more of a people problem, not only a people-in-power problem.

In practice, I doubt that they have a way out of all the lie-parade as well while being able to maintain their position, imagine if today any politician/CEO suddenly acknowledge "oh sorry guys, all that time we were just lying" => Career death (with snowball effect)

If only someone had written by many considered the greatest philosophical text about it, freely available online at project Gutenberg :)

They call it The Republic.

Its recommendations are kind of fascist-like tho. We are trying to avoid that here right now.

> This guy says less than politicians do.

Which is apt. His LLMs are slated to replace the work force, and he will replace the politicians.

"hope to have incredible results"

I would imagine "hope" in this context is more expectation for him than the average person who might "hope" for something incredible but rarely do they base their entire career on it. Or maybe I'm just not too acquainted with silicon valley types. I always thought the whole delusional optimism was just a show for investors.

Do it long enough, and you start to believe it yourself. And SV investors love those fairy tales.

> is that planned for a few days before the IPO

Anthropic is the fastest revenue growing company in the history of Capitalism. I don't think they need any more marketing for investors.

They do, however, need more profitability and less competition.

Hence the "We're curing cancer, no, really" pitch - because within 6-12 months everyone else is going to be doing code and text cheaper and better.

>Anthropic is the fastest revenue growing company in the history of Capitalism. I don't think they need any more marketing for investors.

What’s the source for this claim? Is this true in real dollars or just nominal? What about as a percentage of total GDP?

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2630595/episodes/19527798-anthrop...

https://www.axios.com/2026/04/13/anthropic-revenue-growth-ai

Are you sure about that? They're in the middle of a huge marketing push to get people to buy into their IPO. That's "marketing for investors".

> Anthropic is the fastest revenue growing company in the history of Capitalism. I don't think they need any more marketing for investors.

and people say advertising doesn't work

It's fairly easy to cure cancer by repairing DNA, but Big Pharma isn't interested because they can't patent it. They want to sell us some kind of "miracle cure" medicine that earns them trillions.

The future is being held back by profit motives.

[citation needed]

https://refractor.io/cancer/cancer-cells-normal/

a) they can and will patent it, because in the end it will be same tools "bIg pHormA" uses today for all kinds of tasks. b) they are financially and subjectively interested in developing said tools to combat cancer even if they will be cloned and sold in parallel way cheaper than original. Because - 1) it would be immensely profitable on it's own, cancer is one the most common ailments, 2) post-cancer treatments are bringing in fortunes to pharma companies, because practically any cancer survivor is then locked on some medicine for life, 3) the success story alone, putting for example the most hated person in the world on a covers of literally every magazine and newspaper with a list of honorifics, awards and titles is incredibly enticing to every sociopathic CEO, 4) and as I said, not even generics or lack of crazy long patents can stop a company from becoming gold plated. I can go buy Ozempic generic for a fraction of a cost legally in a nearest apothecary, Novo is still The richest corpo in Europe anyway.

tl;dr - there is no conspiracy. It's just just hard.

PS: correction - not generics, but variants of Ozempic. But the point still stands.

Repairing cannot be patented. It will be rejected as "trivial" by the Patent Office.

Yes, I know someone patented a "cure" for hemophilia which repairs the DNA of said patient. But that's just because no other pharmaceutical thought it worth their while to fight the patent since the number of patients is small.

But I can guarantee you that a cancer cure patent that repairs the DNA will be fought in Court.

"repairing DNA" isn't patentable, but "a mechanism for altering base pairs using <I won't insult actual chemists by pretending I know plausible terms here>" is absolutely patentable.

You can call it anything you like but it's still the repairing of DNA. It will be contested in Court and the patent holder will lose.

What's your source for this? This isn't how patent law works.

You can't patent "repairing a road" but you can absolutely patent a new mechanism to do so.

Most patents are of this form - there are far more patents for improved ways of doing things than initial ways of doing things.

You cannot patent gene repair with CRISPR-CAS because that's long been patented (and also disputed by multiple entities).

If several genes are faulty and I repair them what would be the innovation? The detection of a specific set of faulty genes? The order of repair?

Big Pharma has long figured this out and I have inside knowledge from people who know that this is the reason they're not pursuing it.

P.S.: Big Pharma is now quietly also researching gene repair but I believe it's to hedge their bets. Maybe they're counting on "lobbying"/bribing politicians to allow them to patent gene repair regardless.

if it's that simple why haven't any other countries done this? there are countries with universal healthcare cancer is very resource intensive to treat if they could cure it so easily why haven't they done so already?

Because they don't develop medicines themselves. And there's huge political pressure to keep out of Big Pharma's backyard.

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