The way for AI to win over the public is for it not to be used to ruin peoples lives, kill people (autonomous weapons) and exacerbate the climate crisis just so a handful of rich people can get richer.
Even if cancer was solved, those problems would still exist because it's not about betterment of our rae. It's about rich people trying to get richer, everyone knows that, and that's why people hate it.
Edit, I should mention, it's being used to ruin the internet too with "slop".
I love that they're at this point not only adopting the apocalyptic worldview of Millenarian religious cults but also the faith healing marketing strategy. Waiting for the day when Claude makes someone walk out of a wheelchair after speaking in tongues
I concur with the other commenter and previously felt the need to write something similar, but since they did I’ll do it too. Somehow the messianic nature these AI people present themselves with had eluded me until reading your comment. Really remarkable insight here.
To conjure fire from the skies, in other words. But the way technology works is it solves a problem by introducing other problems, and if they plan to fix cancer by messing with DNA, guess what side effects there will be.
> I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust.
The issue with “AI” is how toxic it feels. Feels grimy like social media. Just like social media, I haven’t introduced any of it to my young kids nor do I plan to until they’re teens. At most I give them access to local AI through home assistant. I have a coworker who have kids of similar age and had to get rid of all his echos when Alexa started feeding his son new Lego sets as “Christmas gift ideas” to tell his parents.
Maybe someone here who works for a living doing pharma research might chime in but to me "AI curing cancer" makes about as much sense as "datacenters in space".
The biggest barrier for pharma research AFAIK doesn't have anything to do with finding candidate targets and corresponding drugs, there's thousands and thousands of those and progress for finding candidates as it stands is quite good, but all that pales in comparison to the time and cost of developing the actual candidates, then engaging in medical trials at all levels and waiting for results and then developing the engineering for manufacturing at scale and at cost, as usually all modern monoclonal antibody therapies run in the tens of thousands of dollars.
How is AI supposed to help at accelerating Phase 3 trials? How is it supposed to help us find better bioreactors?
I’ve read Dario’s two long essays. A fair representation of his view is that he thinks fundamental discoveries like mRNA vaccination and CRISPR will happen 10x faster due to AI, and he hopes this means no more diseases. That’s how he goes from the natural timeline of most diseases being eradicated even without AI to them being eradicated in 10 years.
Inserting my own viewpoint now, it’s a very natural way of thinking for this guy because his entire success is due to assuming a graph will always go up when you increase the inputs and apparently being right about it.
I had a conversation with Opus 5 about Amodei’s belief that most human diseases will be cured in 5-10 years. It said that technically “most diseases” are rare genetic conditions, and apparently that the science of these is basically already finished (and has been since a while before LLM based AI took off). These can be cured with gene editing therapies and what’s missing are “delivery vehicles and economic/regulatory models.” It predicted by the mid 2040s these will have treatments. It predicted the “big burden” diseases however won’t be cured due to increased intelligence but may become manageable chronic conditions by the mid 2040s. And it predicted that it would be until the 2060s until most of the disease burden is actually alleviated around the world.
Interestingly when I asked it how much of the speed up of curing most human diseases will likely be creditable to LLM based AI it said only a small portion (maybe a 5-10 year speed up) and possibly that LLM based AI will slow humanity down, essentially because it produces so much bs to comb through (“polluting the literature with plausible synthetic findings”). It says the AI technology which is actually helpful in biology is AlphaFold, RFdiffusion, etc..
I’m curious when AI will be directly responsible for reducing the cost of anything.
Not “if you use it it can make you more money” but “real, normal people are seeing a benefit, not from using AI but from something it was able to accomplish that made normal people’s lives better.”
Making websites is now much easier. I don't know how many normal people in your life need websites, but small business owners I know are able to use Claude to build their website for much cheaper than it used to be. Instead of paying Squarespace/Wix/WordPress anything per month, they can just pay Claude $20 for a month and build a site, have Cloudflare host it via pages for free, and save money.
That's not how web sites work, most everybody everybody is still paying for content hosting, it's much simpler, with or without AI.
> Instead of paying ...WordPress.
WordPress has been free to download and install long before AI, indie developers would customize one for you for next to nothing.
Building small web sites has never been expensive, most small businesses had sites before AI, mostly static, just to show their contact phone numbers, that ain't changing.
If all AI can do is small web sites for the couple/three plumbers who still don't have one, we're wasting trillions.
Curing cancer is impossible, because cancer isn't one thing. For example, I have a cure for cancer. And not just some benign thing but scary leukaemia, specifically chronic myelogenous leukaemia (CML) in which genes on two chromosomes get switched and use a molecule called ATP to activate other proteins that cause cancerous growths. The cure is to block ATP using a drug called imantinib. So there, I've cured cancer!
What's that? You don't have CML but some other type of cancer? Well I didn't say I could cure all cancer, you should have read the fine print. Now gimme more money.
Hmmm. That really just means that specific treatment angle wouldn't work for other cancers. Not that zero conceptual treatment pathways might work for both CML and other cancers.
And make jobs. If sama and Dario said they have plans to invest in whatever research they want to do with their money, creating jobs, people can train up for that and anticipate the future instead of it being this looming scary thing.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 28.8 ms ] threadEven if cancer was solved, those problems would still exist because it's not about betterment of our rae. It's about rich people trying to get richer, everyone knows that, and that's why people hate it.
Edit, I should mention, it's being used to ruin the internet too with "slop".
- https://twitter.com/darioamodei/status/2088758819304443967 / https://xcancel.com/darioamodei/status/2088758819304443967
> I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust.
Pairs well with "Dario's wife tried to raise money from Epstein for a porn studio" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294219).
The biggest barrier for pharma research AFAIK doesn't have anything to do with finding candidate targets and corresponding drugs, there's thousands and thousands of those and progress for finding candidates as it stands is quite good, but all that pales in comparison to the time and cost of developing the actual candidates, then engaging in medical trials at all levels and waiting for results and then developing the engineering for manufacturing at scale and at cost, as usually all modern monoclonal antibody therapies run in the tens of thousands of dollars. How is AI supposed to help at accelerating Phase 3 trials? How is it supposed to help us find better bioreactors?
Inserting my own viewpoint now, it’s a very natural way of thinking for this guy because his entire success is due to assuming a graph will always go up when you increase the inputs and apparently being right about it.
Interestingly when I asked it how much of the speed up of curing most human diseases will likely be creditable to LLM based AI it said only a small portion (maybe a 5-10 year speed up) and possibly that LLM based AI will slow humanity down, essentially because it produces so much bs to comb through (“polluting the literature with plausible synthetic findings”). It says the AI technology which is actually helpful in biology is AlphaFold, RFdiffusion, etc..
Not “if you use it it can make you more money” but “real, normal people are seeing a benefit, not from using AI but from something it was able to accomplish that made normal people’s lives better.”
> Instead of paying ...WordPress.
WordPress has been free to download and install long before AI, indie developers would customize one for you for next to nothing.
Building small web sites has never been expensive, most small businesses had sites before AI, mostly static, just to show their contact phone numbers, that ain't changing.
If all AI can do is small web sites for the couple/three plumbers who still don't have one, we're wasting trillions.
What's that? You don't have CML but some other type of cancer? Well I didn't say I could cure all cancer, you should have read the fine print. Now gimme more money.
- stop ageing and make people jellyfish immmortal
- think you can pull that off dario?
Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323932