Comment by littlestymaar

13 hours ago

99% sure it's BS though.

How can anyone believe that a guy could use a text-generating AI to design a novel cancer treatment, but not write some compliance document?

Come on!

The LLM didn't oneshot the mRNA treatment, it merely suggested the idea. Most of the steps in the process were done with specialized tools. And no novel treatments were invented wholesale, it's more applying a documented process with existing open-source tools that's just too personalized and expensive to be offered by any vet.

I find this story perfectly plausible.

  • Why do you find the idea of a man complaining about having painstakingly hand typed a 100 page document over three month when he claims he can use an LLM in a way pretty much no-one has before him?

    It's several orders of magnitude easier to get an LLM fill some kind of red tape than it could be to use it in the way he claims to have used it.

    • He is not using an LLM in some new and exciting way. The process of making a personalized mRNA vaccine looks something like this:

      1. Collect and sequence patient's normal and tumor genomes 2. Predict immunogenic neoantigens from genome 3. Generate optimized mRNA sequence from neoantigens 4. Create vaccine from sequence

      modulo some variations, which I wrote off the top of my head because I understand this technology.

      Steps 1 and 4 are done by contracted labs. Steps 2 and 3 are doable through open-source computational tools and a little engineering. What does ChatGPT do here? ChatGPT explains the process, finds labs that will do 1 and 4 for pay, finds published algorithms and data for steps 2 and 3. It's barely more complicated than what ChatGPT would do to help a student with their homework.

      Legal documents, on the other hand? Have you ever tried to get an LLM to do your taxes? It's not easy.

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