We're already making huge advances toward curing cancer.
They're not coming from LLMs. They're coming from mRNA-based treatments and applying standard science to their basic principles.
And just to reinforce what djierardi said, you can't make successful new drugs and treatments for diseases just by thinking about it really hard. Practical tests are an absolute, unavoidable necessity—and not even just the final clinical tests; you have to be able to see how the molecules you're synthesizing interact with living tissue of various types, among other things, before you can even hope to test on humans.
Delegate that entirely to an LLM, and you'll end up giving clinical test subjects something that will melt their flesh, or coagulate their blood, or give them turbo-cancer. Because there is no comprehensive dataset that they can use to figure that stuff out purely by computation. We, as a civilization, simply do not yet understand biology and chemistry well enough to model it at that level.
So stop trying to figure out just how OpenAI and Anthropic are playing 12D chess and actually this situation is fantastic and will result in them saving the world. They're just greedy, selfish companies trying desperately not to be left standing when the music stops and all the chairs have disappeared.
I appreciate your points of view. I’m not trying to figure out the 12D chess these companies are playing nor I’m convinced these are the salvation of humanity. I just enjoy exploring all perspectives possible before arriving at a conclusion. It’s my defense mechanism against echo chambers.
You just made me think of LLMs as useful translators. I know they are not going to be the ones leading to the discoveries other ML mechanisms can. But LLMs are a great way to communicate though to a machine. Before it was only for those able to code, but now that problem is being resolved.
That is not to say that computer scientists are no longer useful, but it is now possible for everyone to talk to the computer and viceversa.
It sounds like you're positioning the LLM as "a computer that can speak human language (and also computer language because it's a computer)". If so, that's anthropomorphizing them to a concerning degree.
Even given the significant advances in coding models, everything I've seen described and experienced myself with them tells me that non-coders simply aren't going to be able to build and maintain nontrivial projects with them unless they get still better at it. By a lot.
And in the realm of medicine, the kinds of mistakes they absolutely will make, and defend, confidently, will get people killed.
Its plausible. Its just that the effort will be huge. LLMs can do a lot of stuff because they've ingested all of our published text. But, unless we're extremely lucky, there's just not enough data out there to solve this problem yet.
Maybe like with problems in maths: they've solved 700+ open conjectures, but how many did they try? Are the ones that they solved merely those that they put $10M effort into where humans just gave up because there wasn't any concrete benefit in putting in that sort of effort?
yes!