alt Hacker News> Before injecting this cocktail into your bloodstream, would you want to know that there is at least one human cancer researcher who understands the mechanism behind this cure.
Tao is out of his lane; lots of medicines don't have understood mechanisms. We don't even have the mechanisms behind general anesthesia nailed down; do you want to forgo it when the docs cut you open to remove your tumors?
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Indeed, aren't medical trials based on its effects, rather than how it works?
Would you prefer to take the medicine that is proven to work or the one that is quite interesting for academic reasons behind its understood mechanisms but doesn't actually work?
Some mechanism of particular substrates being effective on a condition (commonly when a medicine is repurposed) not being fully understood is not the same as just guessing with a medical compound. AI boosters keep coming out with this line but it's basically wordplay to conflate the clinical/biomedical version of "not fully understood" with the LLM industry version of "not fully understood"
AI has been turning computer science into biology for the past decade or so. By which I mean that things like neural networks need to be investigated empirically, constructing methodologies and instruments that more closely resemble how fields like biology and medicine have to probe the very complex and messy reality that is beyond our current capacity to fully express in symbolic precision.
Now math gets to deal with that same reckoning. They were already well on their way there with previous Lean proofs, but this has pushed things beyond that horizon and I'm not sure some of the mathematicians are ready for it.