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> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid. First, cancer research charities are so

> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid. First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet. They all obtain donations on the basis of "together, we will cure cancer" messaging. They all fund the best science they can. Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks and academic papers as you like, but the reality on the hospital ward will always be different. Why do you think student doctors have to spend so many years "doing the rounds" Dario ? They are all academically smart, they are all capable of memorizing text books ... but there is no substitute for seeing and doing the reality. I barely trust Claude to write code, let alone find a cure to cancer.

eloisant 2mo ago
Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers. It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"
- traceroute66 2mo ago
  > It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases" Don't worry, I'm sure that's his next blog post. Right after Claude has finished solving famine and poverty. ;)
  - Applejinx 2mo ago
    Technically, killing everybody is one way of solving famine and poverty. How weird that all those humans seem not to trust the logic of their betters ;P
    - subygan 2mo ago
      you're right. it coincidentally solves cancer and infectious diseases as well. the ultimate utopia
      - lesuorac 2mo ago
        Look, it's really simple we'll have 3 laws that the robots follow and nothing will go wrong.
        kennywinker 2mo ago
        Except instead of bots that follow asimov’s three laws we’re getting bots that follow the ferengi rules of acquisition.
        no-name-here 2mo ago
        Ah the 3 laws have edge cases? Actually our industry will just release bots with none of the 3 laws, including bots for military use where their whole purpose is the opposite of the 3 laws.
  - kennywinker 2mo ago
    The solution to famine and poverty is not exactly a mystery. We have more than enough food on the planet for everyone, and we have the ability to deliver bombs or soldiers or amazon packages to anywhere in the world in days or hours. Combine excess food with amazon or army level logistics, and famine is gone. What people mean when they say “solve famine” is can we make people not starve without actually doing or changing anything - which is of course impossible.
    - delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago
      > Combine excess food with amazon or army level logistics, and famine is gone. We do this. Have you ever heard of UN World Food Programme? $14B funding in 2022 (since then dropped drastically, guess why). Has it solved famine? No. Would it solve famine if it got the funding it needs? Unlikely. Because you cannot just spend billions of dollars to send amazin food parcels across the world and expect that to fix climate change, draught, poverty, colonialism, racism, illiteracy, lack of education, and propably 100 other issues all contributing to the fact that we still have not end hunger. And no, AI won’t solve it either.
      - calvinmorrison 2mo ago
        > (since then dropped drastically, guess why). > Has it solved famine? No. Hoist by your own petard
        kennywinker 2mo ago
        Assuming everything they said is true, how on earth is that a self-own? You know that saving millions of lives every year is better than NOT saving millions of lives, right? Just because something doesn't solve the problem 100% doesn't mean it's not VERY VERY good.
      - kennywinker 2mo ago
        The UN estimates it would cost $93 billion a year to end world hunger (https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166397 https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166397) So one would expect $14b/year would solve about 14/93 = 15% of world hunger. > The World Food Programme supports over 152 million people annually and delivers life-saving food assistance where needed most. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Food_Programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Food_Programme) An estimated 757 million people are food insecure (https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stubbornly-high-for-three-consecutive-years-as-global-crises-deepen--un-report https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub...) 152/757 = the world food program helps ~20% of people who are food insecure. That's well in the ballpark of the estimated 15% spend. If we spend that extra $93b, we'd be well within the range to actually stop world hunger. Yes, "climate change, draught, poverty, colonialism, racism, illiteracy, lack of education" are still issues. No, you don't have to solve those problems to feed people. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
- fnord123 2mo ago
  We will cure virus.
  - FeteCommuniste 2mo ago
    We will cure carpet. We will cure desk. We will cure lamp.
    - kridsdale1 2mo ago
      That really got out of hand. You may want to lay low.
      - andrekandre 2mo ago
        wait till they get the 'war on carpet' on, no one will be spared...
  - kanzure 2mo ago
    > We will cure virus. It is possible to prevent most viruses by recoding the human genome (requires embryo engineering or pre-embryo engineering) to use alternate codons that existing natty viruses don't use. This wouldn't prevent synthetic viruses from being developed that use the alternate codons, of course. See (1) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultra-safe-cell-line/ https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultr... and (2) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2017-05-09/ultrasafe-cell-line/ https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2017-05-09/ultr... and (3) https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1720875112541364535 https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1720875112541364535 for some background. As for "curing cancer", I suspect that Anthropic or OpenAI will use their high status/reputation to launder the existing solutions (germline, p53, enhanced DNA damage repair pathways, higher tumor-suppressor-to-oncogene copy number, more robust tumor-suppressor networks, more self-anti-cancer apoptosis, CD47 suppression, etc) that society has refused to accept. They might have enough reputation to get people to look at these ideas. It won't cure people with stage 5 turbo-cancer a.k.a the walking dead, but hopefully we won't be moving the goal posts _that_ much on them.
- alphazard 2mo ago
  "Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. I think it was popularized by an explainer video on Youtube, and now it's being memed. The people who think this way want to legitimize funding a particular research niche that they benefit from. A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor burden per unit time from whatever causes vs. the immune system's capacity to detect and destroy them per unit time. As humans age, the balance tips in one direction. If the balance is too far off for too long, tumors accumulate, doctors take notice, and assign whatever labels to the condition. Looking into particular causes of tumors (and calling each cause its own cancer) can create a vast research program that employs a lot of people, since there are so many mutations that lead to tumors. But interrupting the development of a particular mutation is not going to have the same society-changing effect that solving the fundamental issue of rates would.
  - inciampati 2mo ago
    And this business of rates is also why getting the immune system—such as via personalized vaccine—to recognize a tumor is functionally "curing cancer". The problem is it isn't one disease in the sense that different tissues, cell types, and systems are affected leading to different parameters in the design and delivery of said vaccines.
  - root-parent 2mo ago
    >> "Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. Literally first phrase on Cancer Wikipedia entry.... [1] "Cancer is a group of diseases involving uncontrolled cell growth typically resulting in tumors with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body...." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer
  - bonsai_spool 2mo ago
    [dead]
  - datsci_est_2015 2mo ago
    Is there something like a meta-Dunning-Kruger, where someone invokes Dunning-Kruger in a way that itself is a potential Dunning-Kruger phenomenon? I'm inclined to believe that the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually complicated. I would be surprised if the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually simple. This is almost like an application of the conspiracy theory gambit where you try to find out how many people would have to be "in on it" in order to disprove the theory's likelihood. Like flat earth.
- dcre 2mo ago
  I have seen people suggest we will figure out how to prevent all infectious disease.
- siva7 2mo ago
  Claude cured a deaf person. Just look up news. All this negativity on HN is depressing..
  - GPerson 2mo ago
    Do you believe Anthropic is going to cure almost all human diseases including cancer in 5-10 years?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- overgard 2mo ago
  Not to mention, hasn't the pharmaceutical industry taught us that curing diseases is a bad capitalist strategy? After all, why cure something if you can simply treat it, expensively, indefinitely.
- nshshbr 2mo ago
  I always think the most salient comparison would be to say, "We will solve all computer bugs and eliminate all computer viruses and security vulnerabilities." No one ever even thinks to promise this, I think because it is obvious that even a superintelligent computer will never be totally free of errors or invulnerable to attack. Or, even better, they never even respond to surging memory costs by saying, "Don't worry, our brilliant AI will figure out how to produce cheaper memory." Because they know it won't. I genuinely don't know how to interpret the bizarre clichés these people think in. Cure cancer. Make death optional! I can't tell if they're crazy, stupid, or liars.
jacquesm 2mo ago
> Dario must think people are stupid. All of those guys think people are stupid. That theme has been repeating over and over again.
- dmd 2mo ago
  To be fair, the vast majority of people are stupid, in one way or another. Or do you believe that you are smart in every way there is to be smart?
  - Razengan 2mo ago
    You just have to find the correct prompts for them, and keep them away from getting mad at any of the ACTUALLY evil shit in the world, like weapons manufacturers, 24/7 global surveillance, perpetual debt and wage slavery, factory farms, constantly dwindling personal freedoms, and a handful of people owning all of it and not allowing anything that empowers the common peasant.
  - GPerson 2mo ago
    You’re just inventing an imaginary interpretation of what that guy said and pompously dismissing it.
- CamperBob2 2mo ago
  Donald Trump still maintains a 39% approval rating among the electorate. It turns out that a lot of people are indeed quite stupid.
  - sscaryterry 2mo ago
    Go look at Putin's numbers :) None of those number as real.
  - nonameiguess 2mo ago
    There's a reasonably high floor here it seems you can't realistically do anything to drop below. Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_approval_rating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_app... Nixon was 24% when he resigned, which is amusingly not actually the lowest, as Truman seems to have twice achieved a spot rating of 22, though Nixon remains the lowest rating for a full year. I wonder what Truman did to be less liked than Nixon. Those were both well after dropping bombs on Japan and before the first H-bomb test.
bko 2mo ago
> First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue to be influential, grow and continue to exist. I think cancer will be solved by some group that could make a lot of money solving cancer. The probability of any one path working is very low so the payout would have to be very large for anyone to be willing to pursue.
- shafyy 2mo ago
  A lot of basic research (including medicinal) is funded by governments who are not in it to make a lot of money. Sure, medical companies who then develop drugs based on this decades of knowledge and research are profit-oriented, but that's only one part of the equation.
- magicalist 2mo ago
  > Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue to be influential, grow and continue to exist. I mean, yes, "I haven't looked into the specifics, but working from the first principles I came up with in 3 seconds, cancer research charities are in fact cancer on society" does come off a bit reductively cynical.
- Loughla 2mo ago
  I'm the opposite. I think publicly funded organizations will be the ones to come up with the cure. My reasoning is this; any company that is going to find a cure for cancer probably already has divisions that work on treating cancer. If the cure isn't more profitable than the treatment, there is every incentive to suppress the cure.
  - demibabs 2mo ago
root-parent 2mo ago
Claude was trained on all the stolen books in the world, but refuses to help search for some public domain PDFs on the web. It will become victim of the conflict between its core search for truth, the current administration mandate to spy on its own prompts for approval, and secret orders to hide the mission true purpose, like that other computer we have heard about.
mrhottakes 2mo ago
He absolutely thinks we're stupid.
jbs789 2mo ago
Having Claude write and rewrite something now, each time correcting itself when I start a new session… hilarious.
skybrian 2mo ago
“Cure cancer” is vague shorthand. A more charitable interpretation would be something like “provides important assistance to research scientists who come up with new cures to most kinds of cancer.”
- iAMkenough 2mo ago
  No, I think Dario wants to actually “own” the cure to cancer.
user43928 2mo ago
Do you not think that Amodei, who worked on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford, knows a thing or two about how to apply AI to the problem? What he is saying makes sense to me. Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain? Or do you think he is wrong and that applying AI to this kind of research cannot possibly produce a breakthrough and lead to a cure?
- jacquesm 2mo ago
  Not the OP. > Do you not think that Amodei, who worked on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford, knows a thing or two about how to apply AI to the problem? It certainly shows he is ambitious. > Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain? Yes. > Or do you think he is wrong and that applying AI to this kind of research cannot possibly produce a breakthrough and lead to a cure? It is possible, but both could be true, that's not an exclusive or situation.
  - user43928 2mo ago
    And is there any evidence that suggests such flawed character? I am not familiar with Amodei's personal history, but I generally do not assume the worst of people just because they are extremely successful, like many others here seem to do.
    - jacquesm 2mo ago
      I would say without a doubt yes. I've been following all of these characters basically from the time their companies and their names hit the press the first time (professionally) and without exception the 'tech bros' tend to be complete jerks, often on multiple axis. To the point that I'm wondering if success breeds this kind of person or if a particular kind of person is predestined to be successful in this kind of environment. I haven't made up my mind yet.
      - user43928 2mo ago
        If you're so familiar with Amodei's history, why don't you share what concretely you object to?
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
mr_toad 2mo ago
> Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks and academic papers as you like, but the reality on the hospital ward will always be different. And they’ll be using detailed medical records. Personalized medicine and the use of ML in medicine has been around longer than LLMs (and will continue regardless). There is a lot more data available than just studies and textbooks. https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/personalised-medicine https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/pers...
SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago
Third, would it even work? Big Pharma just recently cured obesity, and I’m not sure that’s shifted their reputation very much.
- bigfishrunning 2mo ago
  Commercials, in 5 years "If you or a loved one have taken a class of drugs known as GLP-1, you may be entitled to compensation..."
  - nwienert 2mo ago
    It's more likely they are found to be breakthrough medicines in inflammatory disease, addiction, and general life extension at this point.
- whimsicalism 2mo ago
  Very much agreed - Dario is underestimating the current cultural zeitgeist and the power of scrollable video to make any narrative true. The amount of water, energy, copyrighted material, etc. that data centers actually consume is completely besides the point to be immaterial.
busssard 2mo ago
but now that we have midjourney SPA, the human body will become a big dataset...
JohnMakin 2mo ago
This is why this hype is so annoying - they have to make claims and goals like this to justify the current level of investment. It couldn't be like "ok, we have this cool tool that can sorta code and do computer stuff and automate things" and be a $50 billion dollar company, no, we have to shoot much, much higher, so high that I think the only inevitability is this all collapses in on itself in a financial black hole, which is a shame.
tptacek 2mo ago
I don't think the idea is that a frontier model "cures cancer" so much as that it accelerates research that humans do, getting us to answers faster. That's a hard idea to dismiss after what's happening in mathematics, and I believe life sciences people take this very seriously, even if message board nerds like us don't.
- DoctorOetker 2mo ago
  There is still a big distinction between A) verifiable proof generation (a limited closed set of axioms and a minimal algorithm like Metamath's are enough to verify correct vs incorrect machine intuition, plus feeding back the rejection/acceptance to adjust the machine intuition) B) optimizing an illposed problem (how do we define the inaccessible fitness function) Yes the field of biology or medicine will advance faster, but only because the mathematics and physics will advance faster, any non-axiomatic or non-postulate ramifications actually depend on unknown variables like fitness functions etc. How do you model the environment? That model will necessarily be oversimplified. What makes us believe that a long tail of ever less frequent distinct failure modes (like cancers, cancer is not a single problem) can not be guessed. It would require oracles and crystal balls: if global warming brings malaria mosquito's up north, then "eliminating sickle cell anemia" can actually turn into a death sentence instead of a life-long disease, but perhaps malaria will not come to higher latitudes, it depends on the future!
  - tptacek 2mo ago
    I'm not making a maximalist argument; we might just be compatible here. But I'm not saying that life sciences will be accelerated solely because mathematics is advanced; I'm saying life sciences will be accelerated because the models make/accelerate discoveries in life sciences. The same mechanism that's enabling mathematics discoveries applies to other sciences, and while I get the sense that some people on this thread think of life science as bench science, an increasing amount of it is computational to begin with.
Wowfunhappy 2mo ago
>> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. > This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid. I mean, if Claude actually cures cancer, I do think he'll be right. The only problem is that you need to actually cure cancer.
- nshshbr 2mo ago
  You can't sell eternal life in an increasingly miserable world. There is no point curing cancer, if it were even possible, if all of your other activities function to increase the rate of suicide. If these people succeed in robbing the world of every last moment of privacy, every last spark of creativity, and all possibility of genuine human connection, cancer will be the least of your problems.

eloisant 2mo ago

Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers. It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

traceroute66 2mo ago
> It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases" Don't worry, I'm sure that's his next blog post. Right after Claude has finished solving famine and poverty. ;)
- Applejinx 2mo ago
  Technically, killing everybody is one way of solving famine and poverty. How weird that all those humans seem not to trust the logic of their betters ;P
  - subygan 2mo ago
    you're right. it coincidentally solves cancer and infectious diseases as well. the ultimate utopia
    - lesuorac 2mo ago
      Look, it's really simple we'll have 3 laws that the robots follow and nothing will go wrong.
      - kennywinker 2mo ago
        Except instead of bots that follow asimov’s three laws we’re getting bots that follow the ferengi rules of acquisition.
      - no-name-here 2mo ago
        Ah the 3 laws have edge cases? Actually our industry will just release bots with none of the 3 laws, including bots for military use where their whole purpose is the opposite of the 3 laws.
- kennywinker 2mo ago
  The solution to famine and poverty is not exactly a mystery. We have more than enough food on the planet for everyone, and we have the ability to deliver bombs or soldiers or amazon packages to anywhere in the world in days or hours. Combine excess food with amazon or army level logistics, and famine is gone. What people mean when they say “solve famine” is can we make people not starve without actually doing or changing anything - which is of course impossible.
  - delis-thumbs-7e 2mo ago
    > Combine excess food with amazon or army level logistics, and famine is gone. We do this. Have you ever heard of UN World Food Programme? $14B funding in 2022 (since then dropped drastically, guess why). Has it solved famine? No. Would it solve famine if it got the funding it needs? Unlikely. Because you cannot just spend billions of dollars to send amazin food parcels across the world and expect that to fix climate change, draught, poverty, colonialism, racism, illiteracy, lack of education, and propably 100 other issues all contributing to the fact that we still have not end hunger. And no, AI won’t solve it either.
    - calvinmorrison 2mo ago
      > (since then dropped drastically, guess why). > Has it solved famine? No. Hoist by your own petard
      - kennywinker 2mo ago
        Assuming everything they said is true, how on earth is that a self-own? You know that saving millions of lives every year is better than NOT saving millions of lives, right? Just because something doesn't solve the problem 100% doesn't mean it's not VERY VERY good.
    - kennywinker 2mo ago
      The UN estimates it would cost $93 billion a year to end world hunger (https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166397 https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166397) So one would expect $14b/year would solve about 14/93 = 15% of world hunger. > The World Food Programme supports over 152 million people annually and delivers life-saving food assistance where needed most. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Food_Programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Food_Programme) An estimated 757 million people are food insecure (https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stubbornly-high-for-three-consecutive-years-as-global-crises-deepen--un-report https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub...) 152/757 = the world food program helps ~20% of people who are food insecure. That's well in the ballpark of the estimated 15% spend. If we spend that extra $93b, we'd be well within the range to actually stop world hunger. Yes, "climate change, draught, poverty, colonialism, racism, illiteracy, lack of education" are still issues. No, you don't have to solve those problems to feed people. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
fnord123 2mo ago
We will cure virus.
- FeteCommuniste 2mo ago
  We will cure carpet. We will cure desk. We will cure lamp.
  - kridsdale1 2mo ago
    That really got out of hand. You may want to lay low.
    - andrekandre 2mo ago
      wait till they get the 'war on carpet' on, no one will be spared...
- kanzure 2mo ago
  > We will cure virus. It is possible to prevent most viruses by recoding the human genome (requires embryo engineering or pre-embryo engineering) to use alternate codons that existing natty viruses don't use. This wouldn't prevent synthetic viruses from being developed that use the alternate codons, of course. See (1) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultra-safe-cell-line/ https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultr... and (2) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2017-05-09/ultrasafe-cell-line/ https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2017-05-09/ultr... and (3) https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1720875112541364535 https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1720875112541364535 for some background. As for "curing cancer", I suspect that Anthropic or OpenAI will use their high status/reputation to launder the existing solutions (germline, p53, enhanced DNA damage repair pathways, higher tumor-suppressor-to-oncogene copy number, more robust tumor-suppressor networks, more self-anti-cancer apoptosis, CD47 suppression, etc) that society has refused to accept. They might have enough reputation to get people to look at these ideas. It won't cure people with stage 5 turbo-cancer a.k.a the walking dead, but hopefully we won't be moving the goal posts _that_ much on them.
alphazard 2mo ago
"Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. I think it was popularized by an explainer video on Youtube, and now it's being memed. The people who think this way want to legitimize funding a particular research niche that they benefit from. A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor burden per unit time from whatever causes vs. the immune system's capacity to detect and destroy them per unit time. As humans age, the balance tips in one direction. If the balance is too far off for too long, tumors accumulate, doctors take notice, and assign whatever labels to the condition. Looking into particular causes of tumors (and calling each cause its own cancer) can create a vast research program that employs a lot of people, since there are so many mutations that lead to tumors. But interrupting the development of a particular mutation is not going to have the same society-changing effect that solving the fundamental issue of rates would.
- inciampati 2mo ago
  And this business of rates is also why getting the immune system—such as via personalized vaccine—to recognize a tumor is functionally "curing cancer". The problem is it isn't one disease in the sense that different tissues, cell types, and systems are affected leading to different parameters in the design and delivery of said vaccines.
- root-parent 2mo ago
  >> "Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. Literally first phrase on Cancer Wikipedia entry.... [1] "Cancer is a group of diseases involving uncontrolled cell growth typically resulting in tumors with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body...." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer
- bonsai_spool 2mo ago
  [dead]
- datsci_est_2015 2mo ago
  Is there something like a meta-Dunning-Kruger, where someone invokes Dunning-Kruger in a way that itself is a potential Dunning-Kruger phenomenon? I'm inclined to believe that the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually complicated. I would be surprised if the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually simple. This is almost like an application of the conspiracy theory gambit where you try to find out how many people would have to be "in on it" in order to disprove the theory's likelihood. Like flat earth.
dcre 2mo ago
I have seen people suggest we will figure out how to prevent all infectious disease.
siva7 2mo ago
Claude cured a deaf person. Just look up news. All this negativity on HN is depressing..
- GPerson 2mo ago
  Do you believe Anthropic is going to cure almost all human diseases including cancer in 5-10 years?
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
overgard 2mo ago
Not to mention, hasn't the pharmaceutical industry taught us that curing diseases is a bad capitalist strategy? After all, why cure something if you can simply treat it, expensively, indefinitely.
nshshbr 2mo ago
I always think the most salient comparison would be to say, "We will solve all computer bugs and eliminate all computer viruses and security vulnerabilities." No one ever even thinks to promise this, I think because it is obvious that even a superintelligent computer will never be totally free of errors or invulnerable to attack. Or, even better, they never even respond to surging memory costs by saying, "Don't worry, our brilliant AI will figure out how to produce cheaper memory." Because they know it won't. I genuinely don't know how to interpret the bizarre clichés these people think in. Cure cancer. Make death optional! I can't tell if they're crazy, stupid, or liars.

jacquesm 2mo ago

> Dario must think people are stupid. All of those guys think people are stupid. That theme has been repeating over and over again.

dmd 2mo ago
To be fair, the vast majority of people are stupid, in one way or another. Or do you believe that you are smart in every way there is to be smart?
- Razengan 2mo ago
  You just have to find the correct prompts for them, and keep them away from getting mad at any of the ACTUALLY evil shit in the world, like weapons manufacturers, 24/7 global surveillance, perpetual debt and wage slavery, factory farms, constantly dwindling personal freedoms, and a handful of people owning all of it and not allowing anything that empowers the common peasant.
- GPerson 2mo ago
  You’re just inventing an imaginary interpretation of what that guy said and pompously dismissing it.
CamperBob2 2mo ago
Donald Trump still maintains a 39% approval rating among the electorate. It turns out that a lot of people are indeed quite stupid.
- sscaryterry 2mo ago
  Go look at Putin's numbers :) None of those number as real.
- nonameiguess 2mo ago
  There's a reasonably high floor here it seems you can't realistically do anything to drop below. Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_approval_rating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_app... Nixon was 24% when he resigned, which is amusingly not actually the lowest, as Truman seems to have twice achieved a spot rating of 22, though Nixon remains the lowest rating for a full year. I wonder what Truman did to be less liked than Nixon. Those were both well after dropping bombs on Japan and before the first H-bomb test.

bko 2mo ago

> First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue to be influential, grow and continue to exist. I think cancer will be solved by some group that could make a lot of money solving cancer. The probability of any one path working is very low so the payout would have to be very large for anyone to be willing to pursue.

shafyy 2mo ago
A lot of basic research (including medicinal) is funded by governments who are not in it to make a lot of money. Sure, medical companies who then develop drugs based on this decades of knowledge and research are profit-oriented, but that's only one part of the equation.
magicalist 2mo ago
> Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue to be influential, grow and continue to exist. I mean, yes, "I haven't looked into the specifics, but working from the first principles I came up with in 3 seconds, cancer research charities are in fact cancer on society" does come off a bit reductively cynical.
Loughla 2mo ago
I'm the opposite. I think publicly funded organizations will be the ones to come up with the cure. My reasoning is this; any company that is going to find a cure for cancer probably already has divisions that work on treating cancer. If the cure isn't more profitable than the treatment, there is every incentive to suppress the cure.
- demibabs 2mo ago

root-parent 2mo ago

Claude was trained on all the stolen books in the world, but refuses to help search for some public domain PDFs on the web. It will become victim of the conflict between its core search for truth, the current administration mandate to spy on its own prompts for approval, and secret orders to hide the mission true purpose, like that other computer we have heard about.

mrhottakes 2mo ago

He absolutely thinks we're stupid.

jbs789 2mo ago

Having Claude write and rewrite something now, each time correcting itself when I start a new session… hilarious.

skybrian 2mo ago

“Cure cancer” is vague shorthand. A more charitable interpretation would be something like “provides important assistance to research scientists who come up with new cures to most kinds of cancer.”

iAMkenough 2mo ago
No, I think Dario wants to actually “own” the cure to cancer.

user43928 2mo ago

Do you not think that Amodei, who worked on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford, knows a thing or two about how to apply AI to the problem? What he is saying makes sense to me. Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain? Or do you think he is wrong and that applying AI to this kind of research cannot possibly produce a breakthrough and lead to a cure?

jacquesm 2mo ago
Not the OP. > Do you not think that Amodei, who worked on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford, knows a thing or two about how to apply AI to the problem? It certainly shows he is ambitious. > Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain? Yes. > Or do you think he is wrong and that applying AI to this kind of research cannot possibly produce a breakthrough and lead to a cure? It is possible, but both could be true, that's not an exclusive or situation.
- user43928 2mo ago
  And is there any evidence that suggests such flawed character? I am not familiar with Amodei's personal history, but I generally do not assume the worst of people just because they are extremely successful, like many others here seem to do.
  - jacquesm 2mo ago
    I would say without a doubt yes. I've been following all of these characters basically from the time their companies and their names hit the press the first time (professionally) and without exception the 'tech bros' tend to be complete jerks, often on multiple axis. To the point that I'm wondering if success breeds this kind of person or if a particular kind of person is predestined to be successful in this kind of environment. I haven't made up my mind yet.
    - user43928 2mo ago
      If you're so familiar with Amodei's history, why don't you share what concretely you object to?

deleted 2mo ago

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mr_toad 2mo ago

> Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks and academic papers as you like, but the reality on the hospital ward will always be different. And they’ll be using detailed medical records. Personalized medicine and the use of ML in medicine has been around longer than LLMs (and will continue regardless). There is a lot more data available than just studies and textbooks. https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/personalised-medicine https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/pers...

SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago

Third, would it even work? Big Pharma just recently cured obesity, and I’m not sure that’s shifted their reputation very much.

bigfishrunning 2mo ago
Commercials, in 5 years "If you or a loved one have taken a class of drugs known as GLP-1, you may be entitled to compensation..."
- nwienert 2mo ago
  It's more likely they are found to be breakthrough medicines in inflammatory disease, addiction, and general life extension at this point.
whimsicalism 2mo ago
Very much agreed - Dario is underestimating the current cultural zeitgeist and the power of scrollable video to make any narrative true. The amount of water, energy, copyrighted material, etc. that data centers actually consume is completely besides the point to be immaterial.

busssard 2mo ago

but now that we have midjourney SPA, the human body will become a big dataset...

JohnMakin 2mo ago

This is why this hype is so annoying - they have to make claims and goals like this to justify the current level of investment. It couldn't be like "ok, we have this cool tool that can sorta code and do computer stuff and automate things" and be a $50 billion dollar company, no, we have to shoot much, much higher, so high that I think the only inevitability is this all collapses in on itself in a financial black hole, which is a shame.

tptacek 2mo ago

I don't think the idea is that a frontier model "cures cancer" so much as that it accelerates research that humans do, getting us to answers faster. That's a hard idea to dismiss after what's happening in mathematics, and I believe life sciences people take this very seriously, even if message board nerds like us don't.

DoctorOetker 2mo ago
There is still a big distinction between A) verifiable proof generation (a limited closed set of axioms and a minimal algorithm like Metamath's are enough to verify correct vs incorrect machine intuition, plus feeding back the rejection/acceptance to adjust the machine intuition) B) optimizing an illposed problem (how do we define the inaccessible fitness function) Yes the field of biology or medicine will advance faster, but only because the mathematics and physics will advance faster, any non-axiomatic or non-postulate ramifications actually depend on unknown variables like fitness functions etc. How do you model the environment? That model will necessarily be oversimplified. What makes us believe that a long tail of ever less frequent distinct failure modes (like cancers, cancer is not a single problem) can not be guessed. It would require oracles and crystal balls: if global warming brings malaria mosquito's up north, then "eliminating sickle cell anemia" can actually turn into a death sentence instead of a life-long disease, but perhaps malaria will not come to higher latitudes, it depends on the future!
- tptacek 2mo ago
  I'm not making a maximalist argument; we might just be compatible here. But I'm not saying that life sciences will be accelerated solely because mathematics is advanced; I'm saying life sciences will be accelerated because the models make/accelerate discoveries in life sciences. The same mechanism that's enabling mathematics discoveries applies to other sciences, and while I get the sense that some people on this thread think of life science as bench science, an increasing amount of it is computational to begin with.

Wowfunhappy 2mo ago

>> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. > This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid. I mean, if Claude actually cures cancer, I do think he'll be right. The only problem is that you need to actually cure cancer.

nshshbr 2mo ago
You can't sell eternal life in an increasingly miserable world. There is no point curing cancer, if it were even possible, if all of your other activities function to increase the rate of suicide. If these people succeed in robbing the world of every last moment of privacy, every last spark of creativity, and all possibility of genuine human connection, cancer will be the least of your problems.