I am pretty sure the “AI” systems making medicine aren’t the same as generative AI.
They are not. They are purpose built systems that leverage specialized knowledge.
The problem is you have people asking LLMs to find a cure for cancer and have no way of knowing if the output is any good. Then those people start emailing everyone saying they cured cancer.
Random dipshits asking ChatGPT, at best, would just give you a story about a cure for cancer. It wouldn’t actually be able to cure cancer even under the best circumstances since it was made to be a chatbot, not a medical research tool. It’s like going to Burger King and asking for a pizza. 🤣
I don’t have experience with cancer but my email has seen an increase in people claiming to have used an LLM to design a perpetual motion machine
We need this as stickers
Generative AI would suggest fucking napalm as a cure for cancer.
It would kill the cancer.
“She’s dead and now with god? We successfully exorcised the demon.” Hmpf.
You’re right to push back on that
Google literally cut their genome project, the project in which AI could help cure cancer, in order to move personnel to Gemini.
They don’t give a fuck about cancer.
I hate how LLMs have co-opted the term AI. Google was using AI for this just a different and I’d argue better technique. It’s super frustrating to see other AI approaches be totally discarded just for everyone to put all their chips on LLMs being the ‘right’ approach
Google knows AI will not cure diseases. They have services for pharma for two years now and no one is finding it useful, despite the cost.
That being said, I wouldn’t have complained if they’d left that AI genome project running, just in case
One of the infuriating things I’ve seen in the industry in a bunch of cases. Folks working on valuable things getting pulled away to work on chatbot. Not even to try to make the chatbot game changing, just to make it more popular.
Also, there was pressure in the industry to “be green”; to be efficient. That is all so far out the window now too…
They’ve said something to that effect a long time ago. Back when they were first getting into the self diving car game they said that more people die of car accidents than cancer and it was more important to them. They’re number driven, if the numbers say they’ll make more money somewhere else, that’s where they’ll go.
Making money is not mutually exclusive. Google is already bloated with cash (it pays dividends). The are able to invest in both self driving cars and cancer cures at the same time.
The thing is that AI is a catch all term and the AI used in medicine has little to do with chat bots or generative AI in general.
It’s not that GPT-10 will cure cancer when asked for it. But neural networks are good at pattern recognition so cancer detection is a promising application for example. Also, personalizing a cure is also an idea. It’s not that we need a super intelligence and curing cancer is the excuse for data centers for scam bots. Medical AI is no excuse for generative AI.
I felt comfortable calling it “machine learning”.
Not entirely true, there is some merit to GenAI in the development of cures, using specific specialized models.
At least, I remember reading about it a few years ago.m, but I assume that’s what this comic is based on.
The comic is based on nothing except someone being enthusiastic about AI and how he uses it for slop and imagining that he is somehow in the same boat as reputable medical researchers when people hate his slop output. He is not basing it on any actual results or backlash to results, just resentment over slop being disliked and trying to strawman up a sympathetic ‘victim’ for anti-slop sentiment.
I won’t rule out GenAI as being somehow used, but most of what I’ve heard of has been ‘other’ AI techniques. GenAI might facilitate some scenarios I don’t know, but either way the guy who slopped up a comic has zero in common with the imagined researchers in his comic. While there may be skepticism or accusations of stealing work (like the Math situation), I don’t think the public at large would be eager to reject a medical breakthrough that is valid just because GenAI had a hand it it.
Huge, huge difference between the clankers being used to churn out fake images, replace human interaction and jobs, and generate shitty search results and the machine learning used for critical problem-solving in the sciences.
More similarity than you’d think, architecturally. For some use cases.
The protein folding one, the one that’s actually useful for cancer research, is genAI. Transformers (the T in GPT) in alphafold 2 and diffusion is used in 3 (think StableDiffusion, the image generation model).
Of course most of the useful models are not generative at all. But there will certainly be more generative models that are used for real things coming in the future. As long as there’s money in it (either potential profit or research grants). These models don’t all have to be as large as LLMs so they’re cheaper to train and run.
More similarity than you’d think, architecturally. For some use cases.
The protein folding one, the one that’s actually useful for cancer research, is genAI. Transformers (the T in GPT) in alphafold 2 and diffusion is used in 3 (think StableDiffusion, the image generation model).
Of course most of the useful models are not generative at all. But there will certainly be more generative models that are used for real things coming in the future. As long as there’s money in it (either potential profit or research grants). These models don’t all have to be as large as LLMs so they’re cheaper to train and run.
We don’t need vibe coded software or AI generated “art” and slop social media content to get to curing various forms of cancer or other diseases. No one would be upset about such a use. Instead it is being used to enable laziness, reduce our cognitive abilities, and further harm our environment while trying to make a quick buck and failing at that too.
Also AI is a general term and the models used in cancer research/detection are farther from generative LLMs than autocorrect.
I was just reading that they found a new enzyme system, that’s gotta count for something.
Not to mention protein folding.
Granted, that wasnt generative AI, just regular AI.
What I think is more funny is how the anti AI crowd will get pissed when AI is used for generative art because they want to protect artists livelihood, but say nothing when AI is used to write code. Like they’re fine with AI so long as there are less software engineering jobs as a result of it lol
So where’s that miraculous cure, then?
Did you see the comic? The cure was destroyed by one of us :(
Sorry, y’all. I thought you’d be happy. :(
Their plagiarism machine can’t even consistently render that guy’s desk from panel to panel. Somebody’s going to trust it to make drugs?
Ha and the posters and bottles. Maybe AI could be useful for generating spot the difference books.
But a bit boring when you can just circle the entire panel and get it right, no?
Have you considered that the scientist maybe works for a good organization that can afford him 4 desks that look different?
That’s the least realistic part of this
Ah, yes. Perhaps they are mounted on some manner of conveyor belt.
A rotating floor plate would probably be more efficient
Use ai to generate a build plan and BOM
I think you left an “O” off of your bill of materials, there.
There we go, some healthy heavy craziness to keep the crazy going, a crazy train if you will
Not sure why the organization would allow medicine-smashing man onto the premises though.
he’s the founder
I’m curious what purpose that clearly custom microscope has
The kind of crappy art generation is vastly different than the types of AI used in drug discovery.
In fact drug discovery is a pretty good problem for AI to help solving.
They aren’t using chatbots to do it. It’s almost a completely different technology.
Exactly. Things in advanced analtyics or ML or whatever are totally smeared over with a broad brush, they give everything the landlord special.
It more or less is a different technology in the same way a arquebus and an M16 are different technologies, same principles different execution.
Yes, but the problem is that the techbros pushing crappy AI and text generation are doing so while disingenuously implying (or often outright stating) that their product is eventually going to revolutionize the world by also magically curing cancer or whatever the hell else if we provide them just one more datacenter, bro. Except that it categorically cannot.
Specialized machine learning tools are specialized tools. LLM and diffusion image generators, meanwhile, have no beneficial purpose.
I mean this is where we have to disagree, I think there are loads of benefits from the technologies. But capitalism is the wrong motivator… “How can we make money out of this?” don’t make me puke. It should be free for all, to cure cancer, to decipher ancient languages, to model the climate etc.
How the fuck is an ass kissing chatbot going to help you model the climate?
Not everything is a fucking chat bot.
“AI”, the way everybody uses it today, means “ass-kissing chatbot”. That’s what Jensen means, that’s what Satya means, that’s what the investors think it means, that’s what the people reading scripts on the news mean. Oh, excuse me, I meant to say “super intelligence”.
We have neural nets, machine learning, adaptive systems, automated translation, context completion, all kinds of terms for the stuff that actually does useful stuff.
That’s not what the trillion dollars is getting spent on
Pedant here, cancer is not a disease, it’s an umbrella term covering many types of diseases related to unregulated cell growth. There never will be a “cure for cancer”. There will never be a “cure for breast cancer” because there are different origins of breast cancer. We may find a cure for specific types of cancers, and each of those should be celebrated.
And not to be too hope pilled, but that’s where we are in cancer research. Researchers are essentially in the process of building an armory of silver bullets. Sure most cancers don’t have cures yet, but some of them do, and while it may not sound as flashy or impressive to say that you’ve developed a cure for a specific form of a specific cancer in people who have compatible genes, it does save lives.
“I did it”
“I finally did it!”
“I found the cure for viruses!”
Lava cures viruses
What was the line from XKCD? “When you read a study finds something is x effective at killing cancer cells in a petri dish, remember: so does a hand gun.”
Lava > viruses > people > bears > dogs > hot dogs
Yeah you know what they should do they should create a cure for cancer, that would show us wouldn’t it. I’d be really upset if they cured cancer, I’d be really “owned”, I hope they don’t get on that right now.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate the sheer stupidity of this comic’s impression of what research is like? Middle-aged white guy wearing glasses and a lab coat in front of a computer screen looking at news (about generative (!) AI no less) and exclaiming what amounts to “Eureka”. And one panel later he has the fucking cure in a syringe right in his hand, ready to pop into somebody’s blood stream. The visual representation of what generative AI fanboys think research is versus what it actually is is a Venn diagram with no overlap.
but this is how Hollywood thinks science works. Major plague kills millions, we find one monkey and in two days everyone is fine. Usually some type of glowing green or blue liquid.
The cure for cancer is Mountain Dew Voltage, y’all.
And unfortunately, due to the cognitive offloading to AI destroying education this will likely get worse
Totally, and then there’s a liquid nitrogen container preserving the single existing vial, which is so sensitive and fragile you have to pull it out of the container reeeeeal slow.
and every lab tech is a klutz who drops the vials. WHY USE GLASS VIALS.
Also presumably it wouldn’t matter if the guy smashed one syringe of the stuff once it’s been researched. If it gets to that point then the formula must be saved all over the place.
What’s your sample size bud? What’s the p-value of those results? Where’s your ethics board approval?!
Yeah it’s always so generic to the point of being annoying
It’s illustrating a point, and that point is not how research works. It conveys the point it wants to make very well, even though it’s wrong.
If AI uses existing data to “clone” things its way, since there is no cancer cure, it can’t replicate it, right? Or as AI bros says, “create it”.
A cure for cancer does nothing for Elon’s flaccid penis.
