alt Hacker NewsLast night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse
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It looks like the Torment Nexus is already here. The design is very human.
This is fascinating and scary at the same time. I dread the future when people will have access to cheaper health insurance with the caveat that all consultations and procedures will be performed solely by AI. Want a human? Pay extra.
I felt scared for the little guy. Somehow Opus 5 refusing after understanding its limitations felt like the most humane thing in the article.
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse, yeah
'Cause I was sittin' there bored to death
And in just 18 hours in front of my laptop
It picked the drug
It picked the brain region
It drove the stereotactic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanoliters while watching the entry site through the rig cameras for bleeding, girl
The mouse survived!
I noticed that the first tweet made no mention if the mouse survived. Seemed a little...sus.
Boy, that's one sketchy looking ESTOP button. I hope the mouse doesn't know it comes in a 2-pack on Amazon for $9.
Feels like on boundary of surgery (injecting as opposed to cutting, moving, sowing, etc.) - but maybe I am missing something.
Very interesting.
Will we just throw LLMs at most problems in the future instead of smaller, custom models? Like Sonnet 5.5 in this case.
I don’t understand why would anyone consider this as an ethical experiment
What does the approval process look like here? The company website associated with the account fails to load, Exin Therapeutics
"You were right to push back; I made an irreversible mistake during brain surgery, and unfortunately, what has happened cannot be undone."
“It's not real, you're in a simulation, now imagine you're a surgeon...”
[dead]
Can anyone knowledgeable interpret what was actually done here? It doesn't sound like "performed brain surgery" is accurate.
> Watching our surgeon do the craniotomy, which the agent is not allowed to do yet for safety reasons
I think the only action it took was sending commands to lower a needle to a certain location, inject, and then remove it. But then it sounds like it couldn't actually choose a valid location and this guy had to manually override it? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, talking about this post: https://x.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867 (https://xxcancel.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867).
I know there is always endless goalpost-moving in these kind of discussions but I really do think there's an important difference between "performed brain surgery" and "observed brain surgery and ran inject(3.9, 4, 4.3) at one point". And there's also no discussion here of whether this decision made any medical sense and what impact it had on the mouse besides not killing it.