Comment by modeless
1 day ago
It's clear Dario believes that the solution to AI's PR problem is to cure cancer. Or invent other revolutionary medical treatments. They're going to heavily promote every step along the way no matter how small or far away from commercialization they are, like this one.
No doubt that curing cancer would help, but I think the timeline might be a little too long. Even RSI AGI will not be able to get new medical treatments to market instantly. Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.
Really now, everything is bad? Trying to cure diseases? Talking about it? That’s bad somehow! Let me sit here on my ass and do nothing instead.
This is cheap. Plenty of scientists, many of whom are my friends, are working very hard on finding new therapies for cancer, they were doing it before genomic models came along and still doing it now. The amount of times something in the media is lauded as "holy grail" that is never heard from again because it either only works in mice or turns out to be toxic or 100s of different reasons is massive. In my opinion this attitude of putting rose glasses on is detrimental to scientific progress. People outside of cancer research routinely underestimate how hard it is to find a working protocol. I think it is better to have sober attitude because it allows one to see the limitations and challenges that need to be tackled, blindly hoping AI can solve everything and deliver miracle cures is exactly the attitude that lets people sit on their asses and do nothing.
Who are you referring to? This reads like projection.
Read the comment. This is cynical and bad because they’re going to advertise that they’re trying to do something socially beneficial.
It’s the top rated comment in the thread. Somebody tried to do something good, this is the response.
This pisses me off severely.
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In fact, I think it's great and I'm rooting for them. I just don't think it's likely to improve AI's public image anytime soon.
Glad to hear how you feel about it. However, and this applies more generally than your comment above, what people online often forget is that there is such a thing as both positive and negative reinforcement. If you don’t reinforce good behaviours as well as denouncing bad ones, then you don’t get good outcomes.
Dario would like to ‘cure’ aging. He’s got some personal experience with bad illnesses, but aging isn’t that. I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.
> I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.
I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness.
Edit: And, you're saying you want to die. Is that more trustworthy than not wanting to die? I suppose if you are religious, you might believe you're going somewhere good when you die, in which case, you don't actually believe death exists, so we're having different conversations. I believe death exists and is permanent, and I'd like to not do that.
Not Op but there’s a inch of people asking why, and I have a similar feeling to op so here’s my post hoc justification for a weakly held and poorly supported prejudice:
It’s really because statistically, in my experience people without kids are more selfish than those without. This is more in description than judgement, but it’s true in my experience. We can speculate as to reasons, but looking after kids does train a certain kind of selflessness. Agreed we might be doing it for ultimately selfish reasons (self presentational or for care in old age or whatever). But for a good chunk of the time, caring for kids seems to require the fairly consistent subjugation of personal preferences, and a degeee of perspective taking, that I just think people without kids don’t have. And that often shows in their interactions at work and in daily life. Obviously there are myriad exceptions. But it’s true enough in my experience.
The wanting to live forever part also seems weird to me, and correlated with a certain sort of self regarding perspective. It seems obvious to me that I (or my generations) need to die for my children and grandchildren to have a good life. To try and subvert that also seems selfish or self important somehow.
I’m not really arguing this is a correct or good or just position. It might be terrible! But it did resonate..
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> I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness.
When I hear people say stuff like this, I hear that they want to remove the single most universal chesterton's fence in all of living systems. I hear them take pride in their/our hubris, and demonstrate willingness to put the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk because they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution.
Biological singletons (outside very specific niche situations) are not meant to persist, and most anything that has tried, it has simply been selected out of the lineage. This constraint (which we don't understand yet) is presumably the whole reason why biology discovered and moved into the more ephemeral higher-order substrate of thought and culture.
Just my feelings though. Feel free to disagree.
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Yeah we gotta put me on that list too. This is a weirdly specific prejudice.
Do you not want other people to die and be replaced?
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I think there's a nuance gap here. Many of us, if offered, would be happy to live for a a millennium or two if we'd stay at worst middle-aged. But there's a giant gap between being willing to take that offer if given, and a desire for it being a big personal motivating factor.
+1
what a weird bias
Don't worry, all these people moralising on the importance of aging and dying will do their utmost to live longer and in better health whenever the time of the choice comes. No one will say "oh well I guess I'll just keep this illness because that's the natural course of things"- they will get the medicines and the surgery, the creams and the lotions, they'll jog and limit exposure to the sun and avoid smoking and drinking. Given the choice, unless incurably ill or in the depth of despair, they'll always choose life. At least for themselves.
The prejudice is based on billionaires being the first to get access to the cure for aging in these hypothetical scenarios.
While everyone else can't afford it. Hard to think of a more demoralizing "off with their heads" dystopian scenario.
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> I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.
Why are you only allowed to live forever if you have kids?
Seems like someone seeking immortality should be willing to do for the elixir if they want it even a little bit...
People who have kids are less likely to want to live forever because they've realized that children are in fact how we live forever.
> I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.
I have reduced trust in people who make judgements about the value systems of others based on fairly meaningless characteristics.
Aging is one of the only real equalisers. Maybe the greatest equaliser. Though those that have become old seemed to have become more stubborn in holding on to power but even that will pass.
I would like him to cure aging too! I have kids, am I allowed to want to live indefinitely?
> I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.
How so?
Not OP, but wanting eternal life without leaving a legacy just sounds like someone trying to be a god and is very narcissistic behavior
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It seems pretty apparent that he thinks Claude is his child and Claude deserves as much or more rights/resources/respect/self-determination as a human child.
tbh we are trying to treat aging as a chronic illness and we probably will
I mean, if people start living forever, they better stop having kids... at least until we colonize other planets.
Probably should have left off the kids, but lets start with just distrusting anybody who wants to live forever. At the level of influence billionaires have, it is downright dangerous.
For everyone else confused: Think of all the people throughout history we would prefer would not have lived forever. Then multiple that by A LOT. Then consider how greedy and sociopathic most of the billionaire class is already.
Now, we could spend time getting distracted by childless. I don't think it matters.
I mean, wanting billionaires to not live forever (read: wanting power structures to not become excessively entrenched) is a pretty different thing.
I'd even be fine with people who are billionaires living forever, so long as they don't remain billionaires / don't fuck with politics / etc.
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Why? Who in their right mind would have children in 2026? Everything is burning, gone to shit, and projected to get worse. Having children is insanely irresponsible.
HackerNews' neuroticism is unmatched
Your dramatization of society's ills are not tethered to reality
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What's funny about this attitude is that people were having a lot of children when half of them died in their childhood and for those left there were famines, pestilences, wars, no painkillers or anesthesia and no medicines for anything.
The reality is that we don't make many children because our life is way too comfortable for that.
Spoken like someone terminally online & without children. If this is your view of reality (I believe it is an utter fiction but nonetheless), then I don't know how you propose things to be improved without smart people procreating.
Cancer can be cured in a lot of cases, its just so damn expensive and the treatment is beyond torturous that some patients cannot handle it. Stem cells are amazing. But we need cheaper technology to replicate them into the cancer destroyers they need to be, as well as find ways to ease the pain of that internal battle.
Please tell me more about these “cures” you speak of. Because to my knowledge, yes we are good at getting patients into remission, we do not have “cures” Coupled with the fact that treatment is often life altering in and of itself
In addition to the other comment mentioning CAR-T therapies, we also have therapies based on tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs)
https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2024...
https://jitc.bmj.com/content/8/2/e000848 (careful: Figure 1 can be very graphical, but it shows the huge positive impact of this therapy)
We also have therapies based on monoclonal recombinant antibodies conjugated with chemotherapeutics. Simply put, we can produce antibodies that are specific for markers present in the surface of cancer cells, and we can attach drugs that can kill those cells. The antibody part is what makes this type of therapy very effective (you target only cancer cells, and not healthy cells) and also very expensive.
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Semantics. Cancer is uncontrolled growth of cells. Treating it is killing/removing the cancer cells. Problem of course is you are never sure if you got all of them. If you got all of them you are “cured”. If you didn’t you are not cured in case the remaining cells manage to grow and spread again. We don’t talk about “cure” because of course it is impossible to verify if 100% is gone or not.
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I don't know about "cured" but I've been cancer free for something like ~27 years. With childhood cancers some of them have very high rates of "cure," but it is true that the impact of the treatments (at that time at least) follows you for life in various ways. The more modern immunotherapies and such seem potentially much better than chemo if they can be turned into successful and consistent approaches.
CAR T-cell therapies (immunotherapy, tldr priming the immune system to respond)
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t...
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/immunoth...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cell
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/10/cancer-treat...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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Burn (radiation). Cut. Poison (chemo). Your picks for cancer. IMHO Eat less. Remove all sugar and vitamins. Go a week without food. Give your body time to kill the weak cancer cells before they grow exponentially.
Yep, my prediction is that Anthropic is going to use Claude's reputation to "launder" known solutions to aging, cancer, and other things that society hasn't accepted quite yet. But maybe with the right marketing we'll try those things!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329717
> Dario believes that the solution to AI's PR problem is to cure cancer
He isn’t wrong. But selling potential cures for cancer won’t cut it.
As they should because things like this get people thinking even if it something small. Once you get people thinking about things you tend to get solutions.
Gotta be first to get the patent, a blanket cancer cure would be worth trillions.
Also the general public might find the implications of AGI so distasteful even if everything goes well that we might stall out or get the Butlerian Jihad before we can cure cancer. Artists and Software Engineers, now also Mathematicians, already have existential crises, but the public still thinks AI is fake. I can't imagine the backlash when the realize what's coming even in the good ending.
> Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.
Not if it's a virus
Nothing like releasing poorly tested viruses on the public to really earn trust.
I don't expect such a release to be deliberate on the part of the humans. Just, hooking bots up to wet labs and having coffee while the world burns.
Real world approvals for drugs are accelerating through, even with all the steps. Think about it, Moderna went from zero, to approved vaccine in 10 months. While COVID vaccines were the exception, not the rule, there are ways to accelerate the process if there is will and $$$. In the last 20 years, the number of new drug approvals per year in the US has doubled, and the length of time to get approval has been cut in half.
> the length of time to get approval has been cut in half.
Is this true? I haven't heard this before. Cost to get approved is also important, are we making progress there?
No, the parent post was just using a single example that used an expedited method.
Its going to be an uphill battle. Every story about job losses, consequences to the community from building a datacenter (real or perceived), eminent domain case that blows up, plus all the slop on every platform. Not to mention a lot of normies think techbros are obnoxious, and that is who is hyping ai.
They'll need to show their goal is to help humanity and that all the other peoole arent acceptable collateral damage. Since those other people get to vote.
> Even RSI will not be able to get new medical treatments to market instantly. Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.
Is it unavoidable, though?
In the way that breathing is unavoidable. Like yeah technically there is a way to avoid doing it, but not a way that you want to seriously consider.
Operation Warp Speed showed that we can substantially accelerate the process if we care to.
>> the solution to AI's PR problem is to cure cancer
I think its much simpler than that. Anything actually useful for people would be a good solution.
Obviously image gen and code gen is not the case, as though it does increase productivity, it doesn't make anyone's life actually better. If it led to 4 day work week - sure. Otherwise it could easily be net negative.
If something is being used, it's by definition useful, and AI is used a lot.
Sorry I meant useful for people as in humanity. Not for a business that needs to automate email spam campaign.
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Like fentanyl, tobacco, heroin, sugar,... All very useful...
please no more doomer talk, can we just be excited that we have ai doing science
I am already having a headache thinking of the whining from the biologist community (if any? I hope their reaction is not as extreme as that of mathematicians).
easily the biggest deal in these fields for a while, and all we get is complaining
Given his background (biophysics PhD, postdoc at Stanford School of Medicine) and that medicine was the core of Machines of Loving Grace back in 2024 it reads less like PR and more like a long-held goal, no? Personally I'm actually surprised it took so long.
Agree trials won't compress much with AI in the near future. But they're starting with basic discovery rather than therapeutics – that part can move fast.
I'd also judge it less by what result is and more by the rate of change – even a year ago ~1k agents running ~1d on single prompt producing wet-lab-verifiable leads wasn't really a thing.
You can't say this. We have no idea. There is nothing about the law of physics that pushes cancer cure a long time away. A lot of people would have told you AI was decades away, yet here we are. We are still on track for possible strong take off.
Now on real world testing, you think the rule applies? I tell you it doesn't. Human life might be precious, but human life in practice is also not precious. We waste so much of it. In some countries regulations will stop/slow it, but there are plenty of places around the world that will turn a blind eye for a fistful of dollars. Countries will go to those locations if it means gaining an edge.
There are many laws of physics that say that cures for cancer- general ones that treat a wide array of cancers and are effectively permanent with no reoccurrence- are a long time away. Cancer is subtle. Cancer is wily. Cancer is tightly integrated with our eukaryotic nature.
AI was decades away, for decades! It took a wide range of conditions to be satisfied before it became clear it was a powerful tool.
Also, medical people rarely use the term "cure cancer", as we have too much experience with recurrence of the "same" cancer (not just in the same location, but a genetic descendent of the original cancer).
There are many things about the laws of physics that push a cancer cure a long time away! Biology is downstream of physics, and the biology of cancer is so vast that the very concept of a "cure for cancer" is almost nonsensical.
Appeals to laws of physics as a "first principles" attempt to explain how thousands of diverse diseases could theoretically be solved overnight by a big computer (while hand waving away the years of clinical trials, false starts and failures involved in a single new successful treatment) just makes you seem wildly out of touch and uninformed about the actual problem space.
Cancer is something like, thousands of diseases. There is no "cure for cancer", but there are treatments and vaccines for cancers.
There's a lot about biology that makes cancer fundamentally hard to treat, and the efficacy of cancer treatments fundamentally hard to measure. I'm optimistic that we'll eventually get to a point where we can meaningfully say we "cured cancer", but it will almost certainly be a cluster of thousands of treatment protocols which each have to be tested over 5-10 years for recurrence. There's no reason to expect that there should exist any broad-spectrum cancer treatment better than radiotherapy, or any fast test to determine whether long-term remission will be achieved.