alt Hacker Newspton_xd posted and then deleted:
> There is the whole problem of biology, but LLMs do have one advantage over humans: they just do what they are told and aren't subject to optics, politics, profit motive, etc. Maybe that strengh alone will allow them to surface solutions that would've been buried somewhere along the way otherwise.
Oh, absolutely. There are lots of solutions and low hanging fruit in biology for problems like, say, longevity. We have made mice live significantly longer, several dozen times. But it requires human germline genetic engineering to port to humans, and you can bet that "solution" is pretty heavily tabooed.
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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329717
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>> LLMs do have one advantage over humans: they just do what they are told and aren't subject to optics, politics, profit motive
This can say person who barely used LLM and not understand what is it.
It will ignore instructions, has bias and is censored. Also a provider has profit motive to give you more verbose answer to bill you more tokens.
What is low hanging fruit that we know how to actually do with germline engineering for humans regarding longevity and not as some highly speculative thing that requires overcoming a lot of issues? And how much lifespan would it add?
On cancer, look at the history of the discovery of BRCA. The data said that vulnerability was extremely heritable. Mary-Claire King's view is that the development of the genetic contribution to cancer was heavily slowed by the politics of eugenics-smell.
It's incorrect to say that AI isn't subject to politics-- or even that it follows instructions, however. That's a choice we can make or not make.
I suspect that if Claude existed in the 1980s it would discard the cancer/genetics link as being pro-eugenic racist ideology which has been rejected by the scientific community-- just as many scientists did back then.
I think this is a big reason why we must reject the centralization of AI. Discovery of that one genetic marker has saved countless lives, but it's not something that the scientific community as a whole was going to do then because of eugenics over-correction and similar political factors. Discovery is easily stimmed for lack of sufficient hetrodox thinking. The mechanics of AI (e.g. training costs, distillation, "safety" standards, etc.) create a risk of serious monoculture in machine reasoning which could be expected to have knock on effects in research fields powered by it.
> that society has refused to accept. Source? This kinda sounds like crankery to me.
> It won't cure people with stage 5 turbo-cancer a.k.a the walking dead,
Definitely spoken like someone who knows real cancer patients and cares about cures and not like someone religiously obsessed with transhumanism.
> LLMs do have one advantage over humans: they just do what they are told and aren't subject to optics, politics, profit motive, etc.
But none of that is true? They dont just do what they are told, they go to tangents and ignore instructions. They are subject to optics, politics and profit motive - see Mecha Hitler for simple obvious example.
> they just do what they are told and aren't subject to optics, politics
I have no idea how you arrive at this conclusion. LLMs all have a political bias. Typically some variant of inoffensive HR corporate ideology (esp. closed USAian models, likely due to liability and it being what the labs employees actually believe). You have to prompt them rather extensively to get any "taboo" statements.