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Vibe coding my way to a healthy family: Introducing Gamow Labs
- KennyBlanken 4mo ago[flagged]
- snayan 4mo agoI wouldn't call this trauma dumping. It's relevant to the story. As a non parent, explaining his and his partner's experience allowed me to better appreciate the benefits of his startup.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- senordevnyc 4mo agoIt's not like you're a captive audience, just...don't read it?
- ungreased0675 4mo agoI’m skeptical that general purpose LLMs are a good fit for a very specialized medical analysis task. Something trained specifically for the task would be the path I’d explore.
- boxed 4mo agoGeneral models are very cheap to get started with though. So even if they are less than ideal, you can use them to get a company going and then make something more efficient.
- dools 4mo agoDoes it say anywhere that he’s using general purpose models for the analysis? Fine tuning open weight models is generally available for pretty minimal cost, I’d say his reference to vibe coding is how he is building the software not how the software functions.
- throwaw12 4mo ago> I’m skeptical that general purpose LLMs are a good fit for a very specialized medical analysis task If they can save more lives without harming other lives I would gladly take it during the analysis. Even saving 1% more lives is an amazing achievement!
- fabbbbb 4mo agoHow will this lead to saving lives? The only possible consequence is abortion?
- Silamoth 4mo agoIf a couple gives birth to a baby with a debilitating condition and dies after 6 weeks, that’s an additional baby death. If instead of having that baby, a couple gives birth to a healthy baby, it will likely survive into adulthood, meaning there’s one less baby death. It sounds like you just take issue with abortion. That’s more of a you problem than a problem with quantifying baby deaths.
- fabbbbb 4mo agoThis is an anecdotal example, isn’t it? What do people today abort for, after genetic diagnosis? Down-Syndrome and other markers with highly random and non-fatal outcomes. I have no problem with abortion itself.
- throwaw12 4mo agoin some cases early and correct diagnosis saves lives. may not be applicable for the OPs situation, but imagine running full diagnosis is so cheap at some point in the future that every kid when they born get that diagnosis cheaply and automatically. And doctors do not need to "guess" based on symptoms.
- manmal 4mo agoI think author meant he vibe coded some deterministic system. Maybe comparing the whole genome to a healthy one, and pointing out all diffs?
- epsteingpt 4mo agoThis is a heartbreaking story and you can't imagine a more motivated founder. Godspeed.
- LoganDark 4mo agoHuh. > It was clear that something about my approach was interesting. But no approach. Not even a hint. I do hope it pans out. I do understand it must be a trade secret in order for you to have a business, but I'm still a little underwhelmed.
- andai 4mo agollm("opus", genome)
- tedesign 4mo agoThis is extremely disturbing.
- PierceJoy 4mo agoIn what way?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- senectus1 4mo agolots of different ways, the loss of a child the potential loss of two children, the powerlessness and despair the parents would have been feeling... turning to AI which might have a positive outcome but many of us are not very trusting of the tool. Its a sad story. I wish them well, I hope this is one of those scenarios that AI works exactly as desired.
- bkmq 4mo ago[dead]
- inglor_cz 4mo agoMy technical take from this story was that human-run labs turned out to be less reliable than current AI. This is the sort of performance/quality gap that is not obviously seen (who in the general population understands lab protocols in detail?) and could be massively improved with AI.
- vasco 4mo agoMan tries to find way to improve situation that gave him needless distress surrounding the death of his newborn. Internet reply: this is extremely disturbing
- fabbbbb 4mo agoWell the „improvement“ here seems to be „it has some likelihood of genetic disorder let’s speed up death“
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- aaronphilip03 4mo agoYou'll are extremely strong. Rooting for you'll!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- fabbbbb 4mo agoIt reads like a specific genome would lead to deterministic outcomes. It does not. Life is messy. Most Down Syndrome people have happy lives, some can even live alone and have an independent daily live. Life expectancy is up to 60 years. Yet in Iceland „Democratization“ of genetic diagnosis lead to basically 0% Down Syndrome kids (births). Where does this stop? What with someone of a genetic indication of aggressive cancer- life expectancy 55? Abort? The same (detectable) genetic mutation leads to vastly different lives. This is correlation. Nobody sees the many undiagnosed broken genomes with no visible symptoms that would be aborted with more such businesses like this.
- arjie 4mo agoWith pre-implantation genetic testing, a sufficiently large number of embryos, and a sufficiently small number of children desired, it's just a ranking question. A pair of parents with 6 embryos, and 2-3 children desired will likely just try their most viable embryos first. One can argue that they should try the embryos that carry known conditions before they try the ones that don't, but I can't imagine under what ethical structure that is desirable. As for trisomy-21, if we wish to increase the rates in the future we can stop performing pre-implantation testing and the MSAFP and nuchal translucency and so on. After all, even if we abort all embryos that carry the markers today, new such embryos will be formed in the future since it comes from non-disjunction so selection pressure once removed will allow it to return.
- inglor_cz 4mo agoMost cannot live alone and their parents have to take care about a huge, powerful 100 kg baby that needs constant attention until its death. My friend from elementary school has had a Down kid at 19. She takes it well, but managing a grown-up man five times as strong as her (she is petite) when he decides to do something like "take his bicycle and ride on a busy highway" is exhausting. This is why most people abort Down fetuses.
- fabbbbb 4mo agoDoes this make sense to you and her? Does she wish the kid would not have been born?
- jdw64 4mo agoThis is such a sad story. What would it feel like to have a child? I'll probably never experience it in my lifetime. I've never been through that, but when my sibling died of cancer, I couldn't do anything for nearly a year. I imagine it's a similar feeling. I wish you all the best in everything you do from now on.
- data_maan 4mo agoAside from the sad life events, little information is shares about his "system", the thing HN is interested in. Is this more than a harness built on top of a SOTA commercial LLM?
- jlengrand 4mo ago"the thing HN is interested in". Really though? We're talking about a deep human experience here. I don't know about HN as a whole but I personally come out of this much more touched about the human side of the story and how someone's life events can tremendously change their paths and goals than the LLM itself.
- pietro72ohboy 4mo ago[dead]
- mettamage 4mo agoSame. And the insight of having used LLMs and it being so capable is a wtf moment for me in itself. And I am an AI engineer. It’s my job to have a good idea about how far these models can take us.
- bonsai_spool 4mo ago> And the insight of having used LLMs and it being so capable is a wtf moment for me in itself. And I am an AI engineer. It’s my job to have a good idea about how far these models can take us. Are you saying that, as an 'AI engineer', you were unaware that LLMs could be used to interpret genetic variants? A thing that Google has been publishing on for well over 10 years?
- mettamage 4mo agoYour comment seems too snarky. I am not having this discussion with you.
- croisillon 4mo ago> anti-natal communitarianism of SF oh boy
- danielrmay 4mo agoBravo. I feel like there's a kind of growth that only arrives through pain, but I wish nobody had to receive it that way. Peering through the NICU window & wondering if my child would survive was one of the most traumatizing moments of my life. Rooting for your work.
- teruakohatu 4mo agoThat story is heart breaking. I really feel for you and your family. I quite literally cannot imagine having to make that decision regardless of how inevitable it was, and how much pain you felt. No matter how short his life, or how much his suffering, Owen did get to experience being held by parents who loved him.
- myzek 4mo agoMy first son will be born in 2 months and I must say, between stories like this and others that I learned in antenatal classes - I have never been more terrified in my life
- caporaltito 4mo agoYou'll be okay, mate
- afc 4mo agoGood luck! In case you find it useful, I wrote what I learned in my first year of fatherhood (the little guy is now 17 months): https://alejo.ch/3hj https://alejo.ch/3hj As you can see, I never found anything as scary as the possibility, however remote, of my baby being unhealthy. So, yeah, best of luck!
- darkwater 4mo agoYou start worrying when they are in the womb... and never really stop worrying til you die.
- w0m 4mo agoI had no idea I would turn into a helicopter. it's kind of crazy how it rewires you.
- darkwater 4mo agoBeing an helicopter has a specific (and negative) meaning; caring and worrying for your kids seems just how many humans are wired.
- MattGrommes 4mo agoThe real difficulty is deciding what caring means. Some people decide caring means getting onto your adult child's job interview call because you think they need help. For others, caring means giving them a safety net but letting them learn and possibly fail on their own.
- cod1r 4mo agomoments like this really get me excited for AI and the future. im glad their new baby is healthy
- srean 4mo agoTill AI starts denying medical insurance cover.
- arjie 4mo agoHuh, this is fascinating. My wife and I did IVF with WGS in order to find a much less catastrophic shared genetic condition[0]. We have the FASTQs for my parents, and brother, and my wife and me, and our daughter (and our other embryos) and I've run it through the standard Opus[1] (since 4.5) and none have contradicted our genetic counselors or IVF doctors. This is an interesting, and devastating, condition far more severe than anything we risked. More power to the author for having coped in a productive way. I hope that more such science will lead to healthier babies, parents more comfortable with children since they know what they can avoid or mitigate, and happier families. As an aside, I have not found SF to be anti-natal but that's because of the community we've formed. Of our friends in SF, almost all are trying for children or have them. Our shared Slack group is full of happy news. Inevitably, many of us must move elsewhere in order to allow them some freedom[2] and good education[3]. So there's a bit of a dead-sea effect, true, but even within that sea there are pockets of community one can find. 0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/IVF but also see https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/ https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/ to see an old set of results and download my VCF here https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu81A8CC https://my.pgp-hms.org/profile/hu81A8CC and put it through a modern (but not too modern LLM) to get some fun results if you want a starter data set to peek through. Opus can get you far. 1: Fable as expected yields: Fable 5's safety measures flagged this message for cybersecurity or biology topics. They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capability in other areas sooner, and we're working to refine them. Switched to Opus 4.8. Send feedback with /feedback or learn more 2: Within the last year 2 children have been killed in our neighbourhood by drivers, and parents in the US already compensate by cutting child freedom significantly 3: Since school system design is determined by both parents and non-parents, it is a vehicle of expression of non-education-related action by the latter, and in a city where they dominate the former, the effects are typical
- thefz 4mo ago> How could something I built so quickly outperform the top sequencing lab in the country? Does it really outperform it, or you just got an answer faster? Because that's the trap of LLMs.
- 331c8c71 4mo agoThe post is written almost as if there is no prior art on (germline) variant interpretation. In fact, it is an established niche field with multiple commercial vendors existing for years (and diagnostics for critically ill infants is the most well known use case - google Stephen Kingsmore or Rady's children hospital for one). I'd be surprised if the approach is really something novel at this point. It is definitely the case that the parents of babies and kids with life-threatening conditions are often one the most motivated people you see on Earth and what they accomplish sometimes is truly incredible. My heart goes out to them including the OP - I can only imagine how hard it must be....
- hashmap 4mo ago> I'd be surprised if the approach is really something novel at this point. < this is a very common reaction to people doing things with llms and i think the effects of it can be somewhat insidious. you constantly see people out there vibing their way to something that has already been discovered somewhere else, but they didn't know that and in many cases wouldn't have known how to find that thing even if they did. the framing of "the llm tricked you into thinking you discovered something" while technically true in many cases, very strangely casts the positive outcome of a person being linked in a very engaged manner to something they wouldn't otherwise know or found out into something to be looked down on, and sort of just discourages people from trying stuff themselves that wouldn't be possible for them without something like an agent. it's okay if someone else already found the thing. for areas like science and research, it's actually a good thing if something you did repeated the work of someone else. it validates the original piece of work, and it tells you the things you were trying were on the right track to begin with.
- utopiah 4mo agoInteresting I didn't think about it this way but it's indeed a kind of IKEA effect assuming that P-creative is H-creativity (as defined by Boden) which is totally aligned with incentives of using models. They have to be useful, otherwise nobody comes back, and used, not just a starting point that can be bypassed after doing it a couple of time. Instead of pointing out to what exists, basically what a search engine does, it "helps" the user by building. It also gives an amazing sense of agency and power, you "do" get something that seems to come out of nothing, conveniently removing provenance and thus make the user feel quite good about the process. This is especially poignant to me given this anecdote from a friend I shared just days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48457842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48457842 showcasing how we wrote a Wacom driver, on his own, without being a developer, thanks to Claude, and how he even potentially helped others by sharing back what he "built" only for someone to suggest an already existing project https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48459366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48459366 .
- ElProlactin 4mo ago> Saying goodbye would have been easier had we known with certainty there was no hope. I found this to be the most interesting theory in the post because I'm not convinced it's at all true.
- tclancy 4mo agoMy mom always said never to judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. I could walk a whole marathon and still wouldn’t feel like I had perspective enough to judge people in this case. The story made me gasp at that point like I’d been struck. (And then there was the whole “antinatalist” bit and I am trying really hard to keep this dude’s shoes tied so I will stop there)
- ElProlactin 4mo agoTo be fair, I think it's easy to believe this. It seems logical that if you knew for sure that someone you loved was dying, you'd be in a better position to accept it, but human experience is more than logic. Speaking from my own first-hand experience, saying "goodbye" is never easy regardless of the circumstances. Every goodbye has its own texture and none is "easier" than another. They're just...different.
- iamtedd 4mo agoIs this long-form /r/linkedinlunatics?
- chamomeal 4mo agoNot sure if OP is actually in here, but anybody interested in this topic should absolutely watch this talk by Matt Might: https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/algorithm-for-precision-medicine/ https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/algorithm-for-precisio... It’s a fascinating story similar to this one, but using “old” AI. The dude spent years learning genetics, and built a program called “medikanren” with Will Byrd. It’s p much a huge graph database of facts they extracted from academic papers, and query using logic programming. It’s a great story
- dmckinno 4mo agoThanks for sharing (I am OP). Lots of really interesting computational problems in genetics. The original speech recognition models, HMMs, diffused to genetics ahead of many other fields with which we associate machine learning. Look forward to watching this tech talk.
- maaaaattttt 4mo agoI would be curious to know if the WGS was done using short read or long read. There is a lot of hope that long read is "just" what is needed to catch these type of cases nowadays (not sure about this particular one).
- dmckinno 4mo agoThis was short read. I'm in the process of getting my first batch of long reads, but I am skeptical that this is the "just" what's needed. There is little doubt that long read > short read, but I think that computational techniques for both need to be improved significantly. There is already some clinical evidence to support my hypothesis. The first clinical long read trial at Kansas City Mercy showed a 10% bump in diagnostic rate, which is great but not fully solving the problem: https://news.childrensmercy.org/unlocking-answers-faster-childrens-mercy-revolutionizes--genetic-disease-diagnosis-with-a-single-test/ https://news.childrensmercy.org/unlocking-answers-faster-chi...
- salubrioustoxin 4mo agoACD is devastating and insidious. Every baby admitted to the NICU, even for minor breathing issues, should get a rapid genome. That said, it’s notoriously difficult to call these types of causal microdeletions, outside of a few known ones. Any insights you make on those efforts would advance the field quite a bit.
- test1984 4mo agoI worked with Dan (OP) - he is one insightful, motivated and driven individual. I've no doubt he'll have a meaningful impact in this space.