Current evolved Cas9 (CRISPR) variants are highly efficient and relatively unconstrained in terms of their human genome targeting coverage. Smaller nucleases and higher targeting specificity would be useful. But therapeutic use is mostly limited by delivery.
This seems revolve around a known retron-like reverse transcriptase. A sober framing would be something like: Claude identified a previously undescribed genomic arrangement around a known reverse transcriptase. Not all that sexy.
For now, this is mostly a story about how AI can be used to parse existing data to discover new biology (which is fantastic!).
I've been using Claude Science a lot and it is VERY good at finding patterns in the DNA around my binding sites - quite often it went 'you could put your primer here but that looks like an Alu repeat, so better not, the primer won't be specific' - it seems like the press release is one step above that pattern recognition? I.e., 'there's a recurring motif here that hasn't been described before', which is probably straightforward to pick up when your context window is 1 million tokens, i.e. within the range of entire bacterial genomes...
This is a good summary of what was going on. I kept reading the paper hoping for a cool wrinkle or function to be revealed, but it's just conserved, highly transcribed array sitting next to reverse transcriptases with a few possible partner genes.
A side note, Matt Durrant has hit on some pretty exciting recombinase activity previously (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07552-4). If there's anyone who's well equipped to track down if ART is doing something cool, he's top of the list.
It's all part of a carefully crafted march to an IPO that's going to determine whether the people involved in Anthropic catapult to a new level of wealth... or not.
People involved in Anthropic will be catapulted to a new level of wealth for sure. The problem is the regular Joe investing his savings in Anthropic, thinking he is going to be catapulted as well ...
There's still time for them to be left holding the bag, much like OpenAI has been forced to for the time being. Even if people here believe that the economic activity in this sector doesn't represent a bubble, at least they can see the warning signs as a result of trade and literal war, 10-year yields are back over 5%, oil and diesel are going sky high, and there's no quick fix to any of it even if our leaders were willing and capable of trying.
So personally I understand why Anthropic is only concerned about finding bag holders rather than ethics, decency, legality, responsibility, humanity, or a modicum of thought beyond their own selfish desires.
> trade and literal war, 10-year yields are back over 5%, oil and diesel are going sky high
So I should short atoms and go long on bits right? Everything you listed is horrible for hardtech, but has minimal impact on software.
Reminds me of the spacex IPO. HN claimed it would crash, but I noticed that nobody on HN used prediction markets to short it the day before IPO. Meanwhile I bought in and sold some after the 20% pop. I should start a reverse-HN fund
HN isn't a person, and has nothing like a single opinion on anything. It's a bunch of quarrelsome people. If you think that you gleaned a single claim from "HN" then I'd say that's your problem right there.
oh he'll be catapulted all right.