Comment by bijowo1676

11 hours ago

we do have high precision microscopes that can see molecules, so it is possible to build closed system with feedback loop that feeds back into AI at very small scales

It's often not necessarily about visibility, but real iteration time.

For instance, let's say we are doing biology on plants, which is still much easier than doing human trials. No matter how motivated claude might get, you aren't getting a corn plant to grow in 40 seconds. Real world research pipelines involve stages where even greenhouses don't do, and sacks of grain are shipped to Hawaii, or Brazil, or wherever, to try to get practical data for a given test.

If your computer simulation is so accurate you can skip a step now done with biology, great, but it gets harder the larger your problem is. I might see if a molecule kills bacteria kind of quickly, but what does a molecule do to a real human being? Not so easy.

I don't follow how "we can see tiny stuff" = "it is possible to build closed system"?

Seeing tiny stuff doesn't magically give you enough info for Claude to reason with the system predictably (the way it can with source code).

  • It can start to reason about what it seems under the microscope. You just need to train it on images and data from microscopes.

    • Have you looked at cells and tissues under a microscope? There’s patterns upon patterns inside patterns under and over and through other patterns.

      There’s no well-labeled dataset for all this because we don’t know everything we are looking at.

      Take a neuron. You can stain it so you can tell apart an axon and a dendrite. But if you don’t it’s very possible to miss or mislabel the axon, because unlike the textbook neuron, the axon isn’t always obviously oriented in a way that promotes ID.

      And that’s just one example. With more complex samples, you also have a lot of edges which AI models don’t segment very well.

      2 replies →

  • the transition is in-silico => in-vitro => in-vivo

    AI already can do in-silico simulation

    add microscopes and tiny precision actuators, and we can build closed feedback loop in-vitro system

    once we have in-vitro, it will be easier to go in-vivo