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Hi! I agree with you, which is why I wrote this- but if you google "are mitochondria alive" gemini says it isn't. And yes, the cells in your heart have an effe
by liyamchitayat 2y ago
Hi!
I agree with you, which is why I wrote this- but if you google "are mitochondria alive" gemini says it isn't. And yes, the cells in your heart have an effective and potenitial niche!
We seem to have many tools to engineer viruses, but few to engineer mitochondria- perhaps considering them as alive could change that!
- tim333 2y agoI just tried that and it said: >Yes, mitochondria are alive, though they are not considered "living" in the same way as a cell because they can't function independently... Maybe it's learning!
- jpk 2y agoOr maybe the temperature is set too high! Probably don't start with a single LLM response as the basis for your understanding of scientific consensus.
- _yb2s 2y agoEukaryotes generally can’t survive without mitochondria either. It seems silly to discuss if different subsystems in a living organism are independently “alive.” It’s a bit like arguing if just the wings or just the engine of an airplane are flying machines.
- dragandj 2y ago"Gemini" says? So what?
- tim333 2y agoIt shows there are misconceptions out there, if only in LLMs.
- satvikpendem 2y agoI am not sure you should be relying on an LLM as any indication of anything... More seriously, considering something as being alive in order to engineer them better does not necessarily change the fact of them actually being alive or not, in my opinion.
- dekhn 2y agoIf LLMs work the way I understand them to, they are trained on large corpora which contain a statistical preponderance of statements which are consistent with the current scientific mainstream, so it may not be completely crazy to try doing this; you'd get the scientific mainstream explanation, and possibly a few alternative hypotheses if they had enough literature support.
- opello 2y ago> which are consistent with the current scientific mainstream This seems to require a high amount of curation of training inputs, but I haven't done real digging into it, just going off the more casual "all of stackoverflow" or "all of reddit" type comments frequently thrown around. But if there is such a curation I'd agree, I just don't think there is that curation.
- govg 2y agoWhy would it be consistent with the scientific mainstream? Unless there's evidence that scientific reports and material are specifically up-weighted during training and prioritised somehow, whatever an LLM says will be only consistent with its training material, which could have any proportion of fake articles, Reddit posts, Quora responses, encyclopedia pages and joke blogs
- satvikpendem 2y agoYou don't know what the training data is and what each category's weights are, so how can you assume that?
- dekhn 2y agoMost use common crawl, and most seem to upweight the scientific publication part of it (from what I gather speaking to folks who train LLM models).
- Jerrrry 2y agoYou are literally saying this novel thing is wrong because this thing that can't say novel things says the thing that's not novel is not novel.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> if you google "are mitochondria alive" gemini says it isn't And my grandmother is a bicycle.
- mock-possum 2y agoStill one of my favorite idioms
- DonHopkins 2y agoTherefore, a man needs God like a fish needs your grandmother!
- meneton 2y agoYou are completely right that we should be thinking far more creatively about manipulating mitochondria. There are a lot of diseases (including Covid) that have mitochondrial aspects. I just don't think calling them alive helps, other than to get you some decent exposure on HN :)