Eli Lilly CEO Calls Out Dario Amodei's 'Cure Everything in a Decade' Claim
Eli Lilly CEO pushes back on Dario Amodei's ludicrous medical claims
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei promised, just before his company's IPO, that AI would make cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and mental illness relics of the past within ten years. Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks pushed back, noting biology is still largely uncharted and randomized human trials are the real bottleneck. Researchers and clinicians piled on, comparing the claims to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.
The map of biology is still largely a blank page and randomized human proof is the long pole in the tent.
- zug_zug
In short - the reason medicine is slow for AI is the same reason it's slow for people -- the REPL loop is slow [1]. If you could pause and rewind time, and had perfect observability into every system, no ethical risks, (things that are free in software engineering, or math problems) then the AI could make massively parallel progress.
However I do think there are opportunities to greatly improve all these fields with AI, I just don't think we should lead with an overpromise that sounds Musk-like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read%E2%80%93eval%E2%80%93prin....
- figassis
What's suspicious about this is not whether it may or may not be possible (it likely isn't), it's that he is using it to borrow money now, that is not collectible in the case of a default. You get a huge exit because you overpromise today, and when it turns out you aren't a prophet, those that trusted you cannot be made whole.
People and the law keeps treating this as "just a sales pitch", but it's really theft in disguise and should come with evidence on an S1 filing.
- antiloper
Amodei sounds completely unhinged in that video.
- Bender
Maybe there are people permitted to speak about science and medicine with Claude but any time I tried I would get my session [bio] locked. I take those discussions to Gemini that is perfectly willing to discuss epigenetics, supplements, peptides, cell reprogramming, safe sourcing of peptide API manufacturing, 503A/503B compounding, etc... What other LLM's are people using for such discussions, analysis, self diagnosis, etc...?
- 01100011
Many things can be true. Dario can be a snake oil salesman. Serious advances in healthcare will take more than a decade to bring to market. AI will dramatically increase the speed of human advancement. AI might kill us or convince us to kill ourselves.
The weird thing is that when you create something that is in some ways more intelligent than you are, it becomes very difficult to predict its outcomes. We face a wall of uncertainty and it is impossible to see beyond it.
- ifyoubuildit
I wouldn't bet a whole lot on ai solving all these problems. I also wouldn't bet a lot on ai NOT solving any of these problems.
All these people could be the farriers and saddlers and horse breeders opining on what the car business could do before everybody had a car.
Yeah, in their current paradigms, these things are highly unlikely. But let's not pretend many people have any idea what the tech is capable of.
- program_whiz
best points: drugs aren't limited by the ability to write code or do things on a computer. Maybe if we have fully embodied robots and fully automated assembly lines to generate organic compounds and test them with extremely realistic simulations it may help slightly (there is still the FDA and production barrier). Its just wildly unrealistic.
AI has made good progress in text, code, math, digital images, and digital music. Basically troves of data that can be automated and trained on, validated, and with a purely digital interface. Outside of that, just gathering the data will be difficult, regulated, and sparse (that is if anyone will even give it to you now). While we can write a test to make sure we could generate drugs of the past, verifying we have generated any new working correct drugs is an RL loop with one iteration costing years and millions of dollars.
- throwaw12
One might not like Dario and use words like "ludicrous" for his claims, but lets not forget that he was right about coding that "AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code", but he was off by 6-9%, now 95-97% of code is written by AI.
- slibhb
It's no secret that people like Amodei think AI is going to become "superintelligent" and solve all of our problems (or kill us all). I don't think that will happen but there's nothing surprising about hearing it.
- cheapcheerful
Just to play devils avocado, Dario isn't Musk. He's got a doctorate in biophysics from Princeton, and postdoc scholar from Stanford Medicine. Curing disease seems to be why he got into AI, when his father became ill but died just a few years before his illness became easily curable.