I had a conversation with Opus 5 about Amodei’s belief that most human diseases will be cured in 5-10 years. It said that technically “most diseases” are rare genetic conditions, and apparently that the science of these is basically already finished (and has been since a while before LLM based AI took off). These can be cured with gene editing therapies and what’s missing are “delivery vehicles and economic/regulatory models.” It predicted by the mid 2040s these will have treatments. It predicted the “big burden” diseases however won’t be cured due to increased intelligence but may become manageable chronic conditions by the mid 2040s. And it predicted that it would be until the 2060s until most of the disease burden is actually alleviated around the world.

Interestingly when I asked it how much of the speed up of curing most human diseases will likely be creditable to LLM based AI it said only a small portion (maybe a 5-10 year speed up) and possibly that LLM based AI will slow humanity down, essentially because it produces so much bs to comb through (“polluting the literature with plausible synthetic findings”). It says the AI technology which is actually helpful in biology is AlphaFold, RFdiffusion, etc..

The issue with “AI” is how toxic it feels. Feels grimy like social media. Just like social media, I haven’t introduced any of it to my young kids nor do I plan to until they’re teens. At most I give them access to local AI through home assistant. I have a coworker who have kids of similar age and had to get rid of all his echos when Alexa started feeding his son new Lego sets as “Christmas gift ideas” to tell his parents.

oh, is that all?

Amodei's original toot:

- https://twitter.com/darioamodei/status/2088758819304443967 / https://xcancel.com/darioamodei/status/2088758819304443967

> I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust.

Pairs well with "Dario's wife tried to raise money from Epstein for a porn studio" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294219).

Maybe someone here who works for a living doing pharma research might chime in but to me "AI curing cancer" makes about as much sense as "datacenters in space".

The biggest barrier for pharma research AFAIK doesn't have anything to do with finding candidate targets and corresponding drugs, there's thousands and thousands of those and progress for finding candidates as it stands is quite good, but all that pales in comparison to the time and cost of developing the actual candidates, then engaging in medical trials at all levels and waiting for results and then developing the engineering for manufacturing at scale and at cost, as usually all modern monoclonal antibody therapies run in the tens of thousands of dollars. How is AI supposed to help at accelerating Phase 3 trials? How is it supposed to help us find better bioreactors?

To conjure fire from the skies, in other words. But the way technology works is it solves a problem by introducing other problems, and if they plan to fix cancer by messing with DNA, guess what side effects there will be.

As Amodei goes getting more attention, he shows that he's as disconnected from the real world as Sam Altman.

Prove it

I love that they're at this point not only adopting the apocalyptic worldview of Millenarian religious cults but also the faith healing marketing strategy. Waiting for the day when Claude makes someone walk out of a wheelchair after speaking in tongues

The way for AI to win over the public is for it not to be used to ruin peoples lives, kill people (autonomous weapons) and exacerbate the climate crisis just so a handful of rich people can get richer.

Even if cancer was solved, those problems would still exist because it's not about betterment of our rae. It's about rich people trying to get richer, everyone knows that, and that's why people hate it.

Edit, I should mention, it's being used to ruin the internet too with "slop".