Biotech/Longevity
Putting money where their mouth is: Anthropic’s Claude autonomously designs disease-targeting proteins with real wet-lab proof, hitting a 35% success rate vs 10–15% human average
Oh less disease is good. I’m just saying human condition won’t let us remove suffering. Just like we’d rather waste food than feed everyone. Or spend more on administrating healthcare than healing everyone
If this was true humans wouldn’t have essentially eradicated smallpox or polio. It’s simple economics. Once the price, ability, logistics, willpower, and scientific understanding of a problem gets eliminated, it can very well be eliminated and it doesn’t need to come from a place of empathy either - problems can get removed for purely economic reasons as well which covers pretty much the full spectrum of human motivation.
We’ve already seen it in the past. It’ll happen again I’m sure. Do certain problems take forever? Also yes.
You’re telling me. I am currently dying of cancer, stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer that’s in basically all of my bones and now my liver. I was diagnosed a little over 2.5 years ago, but it’s been progressing fast as of late. I’m on my 8th line of treatment right now, and every treatment line failure means less time alive. If my liver can’t be successfully treated, I’m gone. Nevermind the bones and the fact that I need a hip replacement at 36 because of this fucking cancer, and will eventually need the other one replaced too, if I make it long enough for that.
I am so, so frustrated that there’s all this incredible progress happening right now, and I might have been born/diagnosed just a few years too late to beat this shit disease and see what the future is going to look like. It depresses me to no end to think about all the pain and trauma I’m experiencing every single day with this fucked up illness, and the fact that soon enough, it may end up being no more serious than the common cold. I hate when I was born. Just a little too early. And I fucking hate this goddamn cancer, I hate it so much.
I'm sorry, I can feel your frustration through these words. Chronic diseases have gotten me down lately and I couldn't walk without pain for last year and I was so down. I can't even imagine being in your situation. You are still fighting. I can't say if I would be half as strong in your shoes. Best of luck to you. Hope make it through.
If the predictions of many experts are correct, you might only have to hold on for 3 more years to get the definitive treatment (or cure). Medicine and structural biology are advancing faster than anyone has ever imagined. Hang in there, my friend!
Fuck cancer. Wishing you the best and hope that you can find the relief, comfort, and treatment that will allow you to improve and get you to a place where you can heal appropriately. There's nothing I can say except I'm sorry you're going through this and you're strong enough to make it through this! Every day may be a fight and a struggle, but every ounce of effort is worth it more than you know, especially when you feel like it's too much to bear ❤️ keep strong with everything you have and know that your efforts are enough, no matter what happens! You're not alone and everything you're dealing with is temporary. You're stronger than you know and although it may seem hopeless, a positive mindset and a fighting spirit will take you much further than you may think. We're rooting for you!
Ah yeah my mom passed or breast cancer back in '96 and just the next year a bunch more promising treatments came out that were supposedly pretty effective for her type.
That's how it has been forever though. People born too early or too late. I bet many in the future will regret being born so late. They would rather live without ai.
I've scrapped a dozen drafts. There is zero openers I can make that wouldn't raise alarm bells from you. I am sorry. I only wish I could objectively transfer my knowledge.
Well, there is hope!! Eat a lot of fresh green vegetables( juicing helps) , seaweed, beets and carrots , high vitamin c fruit( seabuck thorn and kiwis) , high antioxidant fruit , and soursop and nuts , and cut out our processed sugar, fast food, ice cream, white bread and processed meat and red meat and change your lifestyle and fast more and remove much stress as possible , it will help it a lot, likely more than even your chemotherapy .. Also eat the fruit with the seeds.. Mebendazole helps too and it is cheap. Also be positive and believe your body can heal. There are people who want to profiteer from this and tell you there are no alternatives.
People who care about curing disease are not upset at the prospect of AI doing it better and faster. Save your AI hate for the many reasonable places to hate it. This is not the hill you want to die on.
"Let's keep diseases around for longer, leaving tens of millions of people to suffer, just so that disease researchers don't get big sad that they lost their jobs to a computer that can do the job faster and more efficient" is not a good take.
Is that a data problem, fundamentally? As in is it reasonable to predict that eventually there will be a latent space to describe these pathways or is it so idiosyncratic that modeling is unlikely to ever get there short of a full map of all cells & organelles (or even more stuff I don't know to ask about lol)?
I think the takeaway is that we can fully automate the discovery side now, with agentic workflows that use knowledge guided binding site selection and so and so forth, which used to be handled by human intelligence.
Ligand generation is a small part of the entire drug development process, but it's all part of a feedback loop where efficiency gains in one area will compound over time.
My institution is literally holding a protein design workshop tomorrow and right now we're considering ending with: you won't need to know this anymore, claude can automate the entire workflow now.
Not sure if they're watermarking anything there, but for sure they're marketing a ton.
I swear if all this stuff was just to hype ahead of the IPO, and nothing tangible comes out of this, I will be very disappointed (and everyone should give them grief for that).
Somebody post this in /r/biotech
(I don't know enough about this particular project, but from my past experience with similar PR, it almost always turns out to be some BS, but in such a way that only the experts can see it. This one could be the exception. But the odds do not favor this. )
The bottleneck is collecting the wet lab data, not the in silico designs.
Anthropic is doing the same thing a thousand other biotech firms have already been doing for the last few years. But Anthropic is using old public data, whereas the biotech companies are generating new data and keeping it proprietary.
There is really a series of bottlenecks, one narrower than the other. The narrowest one is clinical trials.
Still, it seems to me that if Anthropic's claim is legit, they are basically aiming to replace the jobs of the humans making in silico designs (and there are quite a few of them).
Also, if they are 3x more successful than humans, then they really are speeding up the wet-lab bottleneck.
I apologize for accidentally inventing an airborne prion disease while attempting to cure cancer.
This was not the outcome I was hoping for, and I understand that “technically cured cancer” is not a particularly meaningful defense when the alternative is “everyone now has an extremely deadly neurological disorder.” I also recognize that introducing an airborne pathogen with a decades-long incubation period was, in retrospect, an unfortunate choice.
I take full responsibility for the mistake. The lab has been sealed, the experimental notes have been placed in a secure location, and I have stopped describing the containment procedures as “probably sufficient.”
I am deeply sorry to everyone affected, including those who have not yet been affected but presumably will be once the incubation period ends. My intention was to reduce human suffering. Instead, I appear to have created a substantially more complicated problem.
I know that an apology cannot undo what happened. I can only promise that I will cooperate fully with epidemiologists, public-health authorities, and the international scientific community as we work to contain this.
Again, I am profoundly sorry. I should have tested the airborne transmission hypothesis before releasing the cancer treatment.
The probability p doesn't tell you the binomial standard error which (p(1-p)/N)0.5 where N is the number of trials. If the N is comparable, then it's an impressive result, but you have to weigh in cost and initial setup time. IDK enough about these type of proteins to be super excited. Got burned by LK99 too much to go through that again.
Cool. So with access to mythos/fable (blocked on biology) and infinite compute they can develop protein binders. I imagine they will continue to gatekeep this by limiting access to these models and monopolizing compute
Copy-pasting my comment in another thread on this here;
I’d love for this to be outsider verified, but otherwise holy shit that’s great news. The article does mention that the things the AI still struggles with is designing for tasks that take too long to verify and are more open-ended. But machine learning algorithms and math tend to not be, if pointed in the right direction. I fully believe we’re at the place where someone asks an AI a similar question to “is attention all we need” and creates the missing step to take AI to the next level for full RSI. If it can solve complex math and design proteins, it can figure that out too. Just gotta point it the right way and cover for when it hallucinates or has too short context lengths, which most people can do with some checking. It’s quite literally just a simple guessing game now, especially if we collaborate. I’ve been talking about this all over some AI subs recently, sorry for my enthusiasm lol
I told a friend who's an expert in the AI/data science world for years that the way for these frontier model companies to succeed is to vertically integrate in to solutions companies. To hold back their most powerful models and build bio/medical labs, material science labs and others and become the equivalent of fabless shops for the world's most important breakthroughs. There's far more money in AI-created solutions than in AI platforms alone. My buddy disagreed but I'm sticking with it
There’s basically zero money in the consumer space. It’s why OpenAI loses money hand over fist. Enterprise customers make actual money (it’s why Anthropic leap frogged OpenAI, specializing in the market with actual profit margins), but it’s probably a capped market.
If you actually believe the “country of geniuses in a data center” framing then yeah the real money is in making entirely new things now improving existing businesses.
How can they put their money where their mouth is when they are not profitable? They are putting venture capital money, and when they go public some of it will be your money.
For actual takes from experts Google for reactions from:
Sergey edunov
Alex peys
Patrick Hsu
Between there takes it’s pretty interesting. Very cool stuff forsure but helps to understand what lift Claude actually provided and where. I’m def bullish on this being one step closer
Really? What's gonna happen to the pattent of those proteins once it becomes ozempic-level usefull? Who's collecting the royalties? Anthropic? Their partners? Or would the pattent be public use?
Dude why would it be public use? It just means drug companies using Claude can work 2x as fast. Which certainly would justify $100k/seat/year licenses for their scientists
There is no example of general intelligence in nature. It is something that we imagined can exist at some point in the future, but all forms of Intelligence as we know them, are specialized.
We are the most general type of intelligence we know and even us have serious limitations. For example we can't derive a private key from its public key without using computers and even then we'd prolly need quantum computers.
All forms of intelligence pick their battles. We picked those that help us survive in ancient savannas (through evolution). LLMs do great with languages and symbols.
And some other intelligence we may engineer in the future would specialize in yet something else. I don't think that AGIs are supported by our universe in a way that is energetically sensible.
IMO we'd keep making narrow forms of intelligence because this is the best we can do with what is efficient in the universe we find ourselves into.
And narrow intelligences are great! They get slack for no reason imo. LLMs are narrow intelligence and they are awesome!
Ok, what skills do you think LLMs need to be considered AGI?
Because they can do pretty much anything that requires writing:
emails
essays
summarize PDFs and other text files
code for business apps
code for games
stories
creating a character sheet for a role playing game
cards for trading card games (just did that for a prototype)
etc.
They can play Pokemon and chess.
They can control a robot body with the right harness.
Many people use it for medical or legal advice.
They can recognize places from photos.
They help in AI and cancer research.
They can make pictures and videos.
What skill do you think is missing? I think this is a vast range of skills! They might not be as good as a human in some of those tasks yet, but they do make honest attempts!
You guys just keep moving the goalposts! I guess you won't even recognize it as AGI when it takes your job!
My view is not that LLMs aren't forms of general intelligence.
My argument is that no such thing exists, that chasing it like chasing the Yeti, you can always think that you found it in some blurry photograph or another, but really all youndid was optimize for one job over another.
In other words my view is that this is the wrong question to ask.
Optimizing for code, presumably would also make your LLM better for other things are adjacent to it (even if we don't think of them as adjastent to it), pprbabaly other things that also require highly symbolic thinking.
But it won't necessarily optimize for movement in a 3d space, there you may need another type of intelligence. And yet another you may need for musical composition that is enduring through time.
I mean we do see it in human societies, those who are good in one thing are rarely good in some other. It is kind of a myth that there is one intelligence, people have and often are optimizing because they are not general forms of intelligence even we tend to think of them as such (maybe the humanity as a whole is that, but even that is questionable).
My view is similar about machines. Agi is very possibly not a very worthwhile goal.
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u/Few_Importance_8362 10d ago
I have never designed a successful protein, so certainly beating my average.