6 ms·
Making Claude a Chemist
- thefounder 5mo agoLet’s ban this before it gets too powerful !
- simulator5g 5mo agoI don't think it should be outright banned, automated intelligence is like a gun, hammer, knife, nuclear warhead, etc.
- tearwear 5mo agonot really, though. you don't see automated intelligence in the hands of junkies et al. ... and you don't see it coming, either ...
- simulator5g 5mo agoJunkies et al can log into chatgpt right now and use it to create a phishing email to steal drug money from your Grandma. Many people saw this coming.
- orphea 5mo agoAnd they don't need castrated Fable for that.
- pkal 5mo agoI see that intelligence itself is a tool, but that doesn't mean I want an automated gun, automated hammer, automated nuclear warhead, etc.
- xaxfixho 5mo ago[dead]
- thefounder 5mo agoOk I may agree with this. Instead to ban it we should nerf it to the point it’s useless.
- naveen99 5mo agoMaybe nerf should start selling ai models.
- Obscurity4340 5mo agoHow are they not already??
- UltraSane 5mo agoI don't really want the average LLM being able to tell anyone exactly how to syntheize lethal nerve agents.
- bouncycastle 5mo agoyou can already get that information by reading books in the library. The biggest barrier is not information, it's the ability to secure enough of the materials and equipment. For example, information for how to make a nuclear weapon is already there in the library. However, mining enough yellow cake and then purifying it is an industrial scale operation, out of reach unless you are a nation state, and have good mountain tunnels, etc. To a lesser extent, this is also true for producing chemical weapons. The theory is there, but actual production extremely out of reach. No LLM can help you there. (You can verify by reading up on Aum Shinrikyo to get an idea of the staggering scale required)
- defrost 5mo ago> mining enough yellow cake and then purifying it is an industrial scale operation, out of reach unless you are a nation state or a transnational (or even national scale) energy and or minerals company. Might be hard to slip past the shareholders, but dark projects have flown under the annual reports of several large players.
- bouncycastle 5mo agoHighly unlikely. Just the energy cost of running centrifuges, let alone manufacturing them is impossible to hide. It's staggering when you consider it. To put some more perspective, an LLM could show you how to make a Boeing 747 in detail, but the actual chance of someone making one with no tools and logistics would be 0. LLMs haven't changed the economic realities.
- defrost 5mo ago> Highly unlikely. Just the energy cost of running centrifuges, let alone manufacturing them is impossible to hide. And yet that has happened twice already. Eg: NUCLEAR ANXIETY: THE BLUNDERS; U.S. Blundered On Intelligence, Officials Admit https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/13/world/nuclear-anxiety-the-blunders-us-blundered-on-intelligence-officials-admit.html https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/13/world/nuclear-anxiety-the... There are numerous large companies with the resources and technical know how to match either Pakistan or India's efforts here, companies already experienced in yellowcake extraction and complex production processing equipment manufacture. > To put some more perspective, an LLM could show you how to make a Boeing 747 in detail, but the actual chance of someone making one with no tools and logistics would be 0. Pakistan, India, and many companies have resources, tools, logistics experience .. I have no idea how this sentence is meant to meaningfully refute those facts. > LLMs haven't changed the economic realities. I don't recall mentioning LLM's and I remind all that the bulk of nuclear weapons development happened before LLM's were a thing. FWiW there are better actual arguments why it is unlikely (but not impossible) for a non state actor to put together a nuclear weapon .. the comment above is not one.
- ed_mercer 5mo agoI wonder if every future announcement will be met with this criticism. Like, what's the point if they'll ban it in a few days.
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoWhat good is it if you can't use it? Or worse, if you can but it silently sabotages you?
- yorwba 5mo ago> We measured three Claude models (Opus 4.7, Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6) You can use those and they probably won't intentionally sabotage you.
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoYeah. Probably.
- siva7 5mo agoThe thing about trust is.. it takes time to build and seconds to destroy.
- gopalv 5mo agoThe non-professional side of Organic Chemistry is one place where I think AI would really shine. Feels complex like solving a Rubik's cube to write down synthesis steps but it is all a sequence of memorized tricks. Do Cannizaro if you want this, Bergmann to do that. But the synthesis plan is only 10% of the actual work. The gap between writing down the synthesis step and actually doing it is also extremely large. Even if you get the right molecule, it might be the wrong way around or just clump up into a useless mess. The Ritonavir episode of Veritasium is a great example of how all chemistry on paper is a mere shadow of what actually happens in real life.
- jgilias 5mo ago> Even if you get the right molecule, it might be the wrong way around or just clump up into a useless mess. Sounds a lot like vibe coding lol
- fakedang 5mo agoModern biochemistry (so far) IS vibe coding lol. You mostly have vibes on how the chemistry should work, based on (very strong) natural evidence coupled with theoretical development and lab studies. Then you mix and match, goading bacteria and praying that they produce what you want in good measure. Then you take their secretions and run chromatography studies on them to check if that's what you actually want, or whether it's just some random bullshit. If it's the latter, you have to toss that out and start all over again.
- skeledrew 5mo agoOr in some instances that "random bullshit" turns out to be something actually novel and/or useful.
- moffkalast 5mo agoAt least vibe coding can only explode in your face metaphorically.
- 5mo ago
- jgilias 5mo agoinb4 someone calls Bessent to explain how this can be used in fentanyl production.
- vzcx 5mo agoI know your comment is about the absurdity of such a thing, and maybe the stupidity of the administration, but for the readers at home: Fentanyl is actually a very simple molecule. The way it's (and other drugs) production is controlled is by controlling and monitoring the precursor chemicals. So if someone goes out and buys a lot of proprionyl chloride, they will pop up on the DEA's list. This is a much more sane thing to do than hemming and hawing about how dangerous the AI chatbot is and placing yourself into a position superiority over your users, pretending you know better than them, assuming that you must protect them from certain knowledge for their own good, etc, etc.
- smj-edison 5mo agoI feel like chemistry is one thing that current models will struggle with for the next while, because it's inherently 3D. In the micro world, shape = function. Maybe enough textual patterns will let it under chemistry, but like how do you describe a hydrogen shift without showing how it moves positions and rebalances bonds?
- johncole 5mo agoAgree here, chem may be more complex than language, and not as definable as language. I think this is the realm that physical ai will overlap with.
- FailMore 5mo agoI think this is a very interesting concept/question. I feel like programming is more about shapes than anything else… but they seem to have mastered that fairly easily… but I totally get your point!
- snovv_crash 5mo agoI work a lot with the geometry side of computer vision (camera calibration, 3d reconstruction etc.) and LLMs have been really bad in this space. They throw stuff at the problem until a minor improvement is made by over fitting on a testset, then gaslight that this is the best thing possible. Then I go do something like working with raster-based data, or some JavaScript based visualization, and it goes super smoothly.
- moonsu 5mo agoI wonder if chemistry skills will be an emergent behaviour of world model research.
- andai 5mo agoIf they succeed here, won't they have to gate access to this feature, too? For the same reasons as, "if I so much as mention mitochondria, it downgrades me to Opus." Step 1. Make it so Claude can do anything — the whole point of AGI Step 2. Wait, if the user can do Anything, that would be Very Bad! Step 3. Err on the safe side with blanket bans of entire fields The latter actually seems to me a sensible reaction to e.g. the compartmentalization used in the large scale cyber attack using Claude last year. Where they were able to do Bad Thing by dividing it into many, many Small, Seemingly Harmless Things. Gated access sounds bad (and I agree it sounds bad!) but it might actually be the only sensible response to such a set of conditions. I'm not sure though. -- I saw some studies recently which showed LLMs provide much more detailed information to expert users. So we can distinguish between competence and incompetence based on use of language, and that is a reasonable metric for harm reduction. But I don't think we can reliably detect "user has harmful intentions", at least not at a sufficient level of sophistication of the attacker.
- MiracleRabbit 5mo agoI just wait until a Opensource model inhaled all the chemistry books and papers. Lol. They are following closely and the best offer 80-90% of the performance and come with a very small fraction of the costs.
- echelon_musk 5mo agoWhy wouldn't the US gov. outlaw the open source models?
- MiracleRabbit 5mo agoStreisand effect Deepseek.v4.Pro.RePacked.LLMBoyz.part1.zstd
- Daviey 5mo agoWill each part be a 1.44mb rar/ace file?
- xvilka 5mo agoCombine it with automated lab like this[1][2][3][4][5] (and many others) and it will iterate much quicker. Some already do but at a smaller scale, AFAIK. [1] https://www.ginkgo.bio/autonomous-lab https://www.ginkgo.bio/autonomous-lab [2] https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/ https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/ [3] https://www.kebotix.com/ https://www.kebotix.com/ [4] https://www.chemify.io/ https://www.chemify.io/ [5] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01485 https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01485
- anentropic 5mo agoI guess the future is one where every idiot has access to a genius servant, and all that implies
- exitnode 5mo agoI vote for "Claude Pinkman" as a name
- hansmayer 5mo ago[dead]
- sandermvanvliet 5mo agoWaiting for Claude to end up on Derek Lowe’s list of things he won’t work with
- andrewstuart 5mo ago“I can’t tell you that, you might hurt yourself.”
- sudhirkhanger 5mo agoAre there organizations or individuals using AI to solve world problems if they are so powerful as these companies are saying?
- throw1234567891 5mo agoeverything from amd in robotics space
- LUmBULtERA 5mo ago"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- spaceprison 5mo agoFable pre-ban wouldn’t continue an old conversation about brain chemistry, sooo I guess they’re dusting off old tricks now that their new robot is offline.
- heohk 5mo agoWhy does chemistry require inference?
- DrScientist 5mo agoPredicting 1D spectra from structure might be a problem better suited to quantum computers.
- happyPersonR 5mo agoI have the opportunity to try this on some new NMR data on peptides. I’ll share everything on GitHub and show how it went :) Curious to see how the others actually do.