> 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.
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"
> 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. ;)
We will cure virus.
> 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/ultr... and (2) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2017-05-09/ultr... and (3) 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.
Ignoring the impracticality of trying to deploy this, codon bias exists for a reason, it's a translation-regulation mechanism and you'd wind up having to do a massive amount of protein engineering to not mess up everything.
How would you address the non-interchangeable nature of synonymous codons? Do we know the right replacements?
Well, first, I would have to check and see if the synoynmous codons are important for virus reproduction. Second, this technique requires (AFAIK) lots of cell line viability testing and lots of tweaking. I don't think it's as simple as code swapping all the codons and then all the biology magically works the right way, biology is rarely that simple. Requires effort.
This sounds highly speculative then, i.e., the biology could never work out, no?
It depends on what you consider to be speculative. It's certainly not a product available to the mass consumer market, if that's what you mean. But that's also kind of an uninteresting fact, right?
"Synthetic genomes unveil the effects of synonymous recoding" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.16.599206v1
"Probing the limits of genetic recoding using multi-omics-guided evolution" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74300-9
"Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code" https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.ady4368
Speculative whether it could be done with humans without severe side effects that would make it useless/pointless.
Is it a product available to humans at all?
What could possibly go wrong...
I've seen this episode before
We will cure carpet. We will cure desk. We will cure lamp.
"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.
>> "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
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.
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> 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.
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.
I don’t think it works like that.
If you can find and patent a cure to cancer, you can charge whatever you want for it, at least in the US. I don’t think profit would be an issue.
And even if ending chemotherapy would discourage the incumbents, smaller companies would love the opportunity to kill them.
For example, Polaroid didn’t want to embrace digital cameras since they made tons of money selling physical film. But all the smaller camera companies didn’t care, since they weren’t benefiting from that and wanted to just take Polaroid’s market share. And that’s why digital cameras took off regardless.
> 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.
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.
> Dario must think people are stupid.
All of those guys think people are stupid. That theme has been repeating over and over again.
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?
You’re just inventing an imaginary interpretation of what that guy said and pompously dismissing it.
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.
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.