An AI That Promises to “Solve All Diseases” Is About to Test Its First Human Drugs
An AI That Promises to “Solve All Diseases” Is About to Test Its First Human Drugs
A secretive, Google-backed lab is using artificial intelligence to invent new medicines for humanity's worst illnesses. But can we trust drugs designed by a mind that isn't human?
can we really trust a “black box” algorithm with our lives?
No. That’s why we have clinical trials.
We don't even trust experts without testing
There really needs to be a rhetorical distinction between regular machine learning and something like an llm.
I think people read this (or just the headline) and assume this is just asking grok "what interactions will my new drug flavocane have?" Where these are likely large models built on the mountains of data we have from existing drug trials
Those models will almost certainly be essentially the same transformer architecture as any of the llms use; simply because they beat most other architectures in almost any field people have tried them. An llm is, after all, just classifier with an unusually large set of classes (all possible tokens) which gets applied repeatedly
I'm not talking about the specifics of the architecture.
To the layman, AI refers to a range of general purpose language models that are trained on "public" data and possibly enriched with domain-specific datasets.
There's a significant material difference between using that kind of probabilistic language completion and a model that directly predicts the results of complex processes (like what's likely being discussed in the article).
It's not specific to the article in question, but it is really important for people to not conflate these approaches.
I mean I hate AI in general.. but to be honest... assuming no one is stupid enough to bypass the trials etc... I'm all for it, 90% of these problems already exist in the existing system, who owns it, can a corporation charge us to death.
The only reasonable fear is, if they come out with more than they can develop trials for, and they lobby to lower standards in trials. Even that honestly is a more acceptable risk in the context of terminal diseases/severe cancers.
I’m sure all the savings from accelerated/cheaper R&D will be passed on to the consumer…right?
They will, just not in the US lol
Sure it helps with a bottle neck but it is not the only one. Until you gain biological and biochemical understanding of the disease no amount of throwing neural networks will help you. I am really sick and tired of AI people hyping up their stuff to get more investments. It even feels like all this "secretive" bullshit is also a part of the show.
There’s only one way to solve all diseases.
Did they test this on Mars first?
Big Pharma says no the hell you aint
Lovely. Let me pencil “zombie apocalypse” back onto my 2026 BINGO card.
I think I lost neurons reading this. Other commenters in this thread had the resilience to explain what the problems with it are.
Is this how we all get AIDS?