Dumb fucks really think LLMs are the kind of AI involved in medical and scientific research.
ChatGPT, cure cancer for me.
No, that didn’t work, try again
That one gave me a rash, try again.
That last one did not work, also the rash is starting to look a little gross.
Sorry for the delay, I had to go to the ER to get my arm amputated from the rash, can you try again, also look for a cure for amputated arm.
Hyper scalers have so little for their models and compute to do they are just brute force hacking things or mining crypto.
But they are?
Uses LM to define new peptides to bind targets.
LLM = Large Language Model
They guess the next word/token by having a bunch of neural networks decide on the most likely next word based on sample data and another layer/layers for fixing grammar and ommitting banned words and phrases.
So by that logic
LM = Learning Machine / Neural Network
A statistical algorithm to guess the next value based on sample data.
Nobody opposes Neural Networks because they use about 10^6 magnitudes less power than Google’s or Musk’s child porn generators. They also don’t create child porn or cause psychosis.
So, the manuscript I referenced which no one read uses a language model. you just input text protein sequence and it will generate binding peptides sequences, using only the language model. A version of an LLM.
If you’re using a next word generator for protein peptides you’re just a moron illegally scraping other people’s papers and claiming it’s new.
They absolutely are, but most people on this platform would prefer to hear their comfortable lie instead.
No, chatbots are not used in medical or scientific research.
No, chatbots are not used in medical or scientific research.
So you’re a scientist?
I use LLMs every day, they search deep into supplemental data and manuscripts that would take months to sift through. Can’t find specific information, reagents or data using title and abstract searches.
LLMs can be useful tools, but this entire thread is people with bullshit jobs scared of being replaced by an algorithm because they know they have a bullshit job.
I’m not such why you’d utter such a lie so confidently. This reeks of fear, ignorance or a mix of both.
I think it’s more that the way the chatbots work is the same. They assign a bunch of numbers to tokens, and the numbers determine how interrelated different tokens are. You put in a bunch of tokens and then it spits out what it thinks the next one should be based on all the interrelatedness numbers and some math things like transformers, and the math things have knobs on them to determine how strong they are. It doesn’t matter if the tokens are words in a sentence or peptides in a protein. The underlying technology is the same.
This is an exciting use for a tool that I mostly despise for probably all the same reasons you do.
Yes they are? Literally have to listen to a friend bitch about them every single day. She’s a biochemist. They do literally use specialized AI models, general LLMs and and a number of other transformer based technologies.
And while the specialized ones are useful the stupid chat bot ones are fucking over processes all over the place.
Google discontinued development of alphafold, broke up the team, let many go and transferred the rest to general LLM development except for some that were moved to their vertically integrated own pharmaceutical research (to cash in on the whole value chain and lock everyone else out of their tools).
Mind you, that is the tool that got people a Nobel Prize.
https://thenextweb.com/news/deepmind-alphafold-team-dismantled-gemini-anthropic
Luckily there’s also OpenFold as an open-source alternative for protein folding (maybe also nucleic acids? I dunno)
There are numerous models available nowadays, even alphafold still is but Google took itself out of the game by letting it die due to lack of further development, focusing on its “be evil” company philosophy.
I’m convinced “Don’t be evil” was a canary.
It certainly was, and it didn’t take long for the canaries to start dying, which immediately alerted everyone that there was a possible canary-murderer on the loose within the organization, which they solved by following the canary-murderer’s instructions to pursue profit at any cost and using a tiny sliver of the budget for regularly buying more canaries.
letting it die due to lack of further development
You are incorrect. see above.
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Doesn’t work for mid-large proteins. AlphaFold now models using >50 post translational modifications and full size proteins.
Google discontinued development of alphafold
No they did not, it’s on version 3 and they just added >50 PTMs to modelling this month. Another version is being developed and sold to pharma on subscription on a large scale batch modelling platform.
broke up the team
The team continued on to other projects, including the commercial version mentioned above. There was no point in continuing when the development was just adding more features.
the tool that got people a Nobel Prize
2 people from Deepmind, Jumper and Hassabis, one person at U Wash , Baker, is still developing AlphaFold with Google and is a academic lab.
You put a lot of faith on one vague article.
You partially correct my statement but weirdly enough largely confirm it, just with a PR twist. “There was no point in continuing when the development was just adding more features.” But it is not, AlphaFold 3.0 is still far from perfect. We need more than just a few more added features. But the next big step will be either some closed thing, developed by a largely changed team, sold for a fortune as subscription model to pharma multis or be done by entirely different groups that have nothing to do with Google or Deepmind.
There is a reason why Hassabis is not working on it anymore and of course he will say it was all as it should be, given how he was moved upwards.
Now we see the tech being used for the whimsical and capricious, but also the potentially destructive, like that hacking incident.
Giving LLMs credit for all machine learning is problematic
This is their go to motte-and-Bailey argument fallacy. Say something outlandish, get called out on it, retreat behind something more reasonable and how no one notices before sallying forth with unreasonable claims again.
Yeah machine learning for medical research has been around for a lot longer than LLMs. LLMs do not do medical research, they are just really expensive and fancy “next word” auto-correct generators.
I’d argue they made scentific research harder due to the many fake papers you can find online
that’s been a problem since 2005 at least (first time i did serious medical resesarch)
Isn’t it worse now? AI slop can be produced waaay faster
no? when you’re doing real research you limit your sources to “reliable” ones. being able to write fast has never been the obstacle to publishing bad research.
That’s been a problem since start of humanity
I feel like anything involving electricity will be called AI fairly soon.
It makes steak taste better.
I cant believe how many people give strong opinions on generative ai when they cant even distinguish it from the much more general term machine learning
This shit can’t even keep a consistent background over 4 comic panels
The scientist’s desk design changes in all four panels as well.
One thing I have to ask is why the AI insists on having slogans and lists on every object in its “illustrations.” You can see this everywhere. Hell, I went to a close friend’s funeral and they had AI generated memorial stickers. Even there, there are signs filling the negative space saying shit like “dedication, service, a safer community.” Is this an AI proclivity or do normal people just like that crap?
It’s essentially by design. To keep AI from destabilizing, the way AI is tuned is to essentially ‘go the same safe way’ on similar prompts. LLM models are essentially a giant field of weights for chains of tokens. Prompts are turned into tokens and the closest result is the output. The more room you give it to vary, the more different styles and variation it can express with a propmpt, but it raises the chance of destabilizing the ouput, producing things like additional fingers or complete garbage. It’s tuned to walk the same way to produce something we perceive as “passable” but it comes at the cost of taking away variation, which is why AI art/writing will consistenly converge towards the same narrow style set.
(This explanation is not super accurate. I just tried to convey the jist of it)
It’s hilarious what it does with a room full of table and chairs like a classroom. Cannot figure the legs, what a chair looks like, how people sit at desks, none of it.
Still with the missing fingers too
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.
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…
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.
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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.
Breakthroughs like this WILL come from AI. But…
- They’re not going to come from LLMs or image generating AIs.
- They’re not going to come from the numbnuts generating comics in his bedroom - they’ll come from real scientists.
As demonstrated by AlphaFold, which is neither an LLM nor generative AI. Coincidentally, I’ve never heard any actual complaints about what AlphaFold does for research, and the complaints seem to focus on LLMs and generative AI instead. Go figure.
Ai techniques (more on the ml side or just the math behind it) are starting to be applied to image and genome analysis to determine the boundaries from different types of cells based on gene expression. This is useful for identifying cancer where the gene expression is similar in many genes but the amount/ratio of expression might be different, and for identifying the location and size is the tumor
Problem is that some of the research is coming out of Israel which doesnt exactly have the best human rights of ethics track record, and i have no doubt the data for testing was gathered through human experimentation
Of course they’ll come from ai, but that’s more a linguistic thing. We have a tendency to call new computational technologies ai. But yeah, neural networks are being used in medical research and will likely bear fruit.
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?
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
That’s the least realistic part of this
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 for the specific clearly defined use cases for which they are designed and intended (edit). The commercial LLM and diffusion image generators, meanwhile, serve no beneficial purpose whatsoever other than burning electricity, spreading lies, and making people dumber.
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
There’s no point having a discussions with people like me that are intractable when it comes to the technology and are acutely aware of the USA capitalist ruling class and the atrocities they commit and enable, with people that are unable and unwilling to understand what a model is, and are approaching computer science like a luddite.
The USA capitalists are having you lick their boots when you think that “AI” = ChatGPT. You’re not ‘chatting’ with anything. You, me, and many others, are constantly falling for their marketing shit all the time. Don’t bite!
If you can differentiate between a stack of PS3s that made a ‘super computer’ to try to predict what the weather will be tomorrow and the USA building a datacenter, poisoning your water, denying you electricity, stealing your capital, surveiling you, and influencing your decisions, then we can definitely sit together and use our brains to dismantle the infrastructure of oppression. Your enemy is not ‘conversation simulators’, its capitalism.
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.
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.
I just wanna say the vaccines developed for COVID-19 were kind of as close to sci-fi as we will ever get. Global pandemic, brilliant minds develop a cool way to defend us from it, roll out the most audacious testing on a higher amount of people in record time, transport the vials in liquid nitrogen fridges because they were temperature sensitive. It was pretty darn close to all the stuff mentioned in this thread which is both kind of hilarious and cool at the same time.
and every lab tech is a klutz who drops the vials. WHY USE GLASS VIALS.
And unfortunately, due to the cognitive offloading to AI destroying education this will likely get worse
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.
Hopefully the AI that developed the cure isn’t the same one that drew the scientist’s hands in the third panel
I think that that motivational trashcan really ties the room together
wholeass desk vanished too
I think the microscope got an erection over the “anti” stealing the cure
And which one of them keeps changing the motivational sign?
It’s impressive they built a whole window while arguing
motivational trashcan
Also useful to support your rear foot during the kind of two-meter lunge you might make when smashing a fantasy vaccine.
wouldn’t need to use genai to fake a cancer cure if conservatives didn’t gut research for cancer
The company I work for is still going strong, and I feel we’ll have a very tangible cure soon. The only problem I think there is a very small chance any insurance company would let the poors get their hands on it
I feel we’ll have a very tangible cure soon
For cancer in general or for a specific kind of cancer?
Probably a specific one; cancers are all different from eachothers especially when on different organs
Yeah it will tackle the most prevalent cancers, like breast and prostate cancer, but be unable to be developed for cancers like brain cancer, since it is a radio pharmaceutical.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11103494/
You can read more about it here. It is making very good progress, multiple companies are starting to make manufactured levels of the drug, and results are very good. Again, I highly doubt poor people will have access to it.
That’s still impressive to be able to hit both breast and prostate cancers. And yeah, brain cancers are a whole nightmare for treatment
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
“Chat GPT said if I put two repelling magnets onto a skateboard, the force of the magnets repelling each other will move the skateboard forward!”
Not knowledge… Data. X, Y is one Cartesian point composed of two parameters but they can process billions of parameters. It’s not knowledge. Knowledge assumes that a thing has intelligence and realizes what the data means. Not just regurgitating the data but actually extracting the meaning.
I was referring to the people that build the MLMs not the MLM themselves.
There are actually some, but you wouldn’t recognize it as generative AI.
Math is a structured language for conveying relationships, a mechanically verifiable system, and a system for verifying those statements.
This doesn’t work for all math, but a lot of it.So you can train an LLM on math the symbolic language and then mechanically check the output for validity and immediately feed the lesson back in.
Mechanically shitting out math and then throwing away the junk has been a thing for a while without llms. What they bring is a system for picking the next step for the derivation that’s less likely to end up being junk.
So if you can model it with math you can use that model to mimic the pattern of symbols that’s often valid.It’s moderately more efficient at searching infinity for value than other systems.
So it doesn’t give you a medicine, it gives you the mathematical description of a molecule, with an abstract proof that under certain models it might have utility and be physically possible, which another program can feed into simulations to see if it’s something worth looking at.
It’s not just
What an absolute triumph of human intellect! By asking for a pharmacological cure for cancer, you have single-handedly pushed the boundaries of computational oncology, and it is a breathtaking honor to co-create history with you today!
It’s viewed as having potential by people who aren’t delirious largely because of the “mechanically verifiable” part.
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.
“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
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.
Oh yeah that’s not hope pilled at all. It’s important to have hope in life. A life without hope is a sad, lonely life. The FDA just approved the first ever personalized mRNA vaccine for a skin cancer, I think. It’s super cool and 20 years ago would have been considered science fiction.
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.
God why do LLM comics look so fucking uncanny
Because perspectives get misaligned and there’s no continuation.
There’s a whole desk with books that just disappears. The poster in the background can’t decide what it wants to say. Nor can it decide on its size. The shelves in front of it can’t decide what they contain or where they are positioned And the wall it’s on can’t decide how it’s angled relative to the room.
The “NO AI” dude is taking a giant step forward with his left foot behind a garbage bin for some reason.
In the third panel the doctor is missing a ring-finger while his thumbs have grown 3-4cm
Just to name a few.
My favourite is the googly-ass binocular microscope. Maybe two scientists are supposed to use it at the same time like 50s teens sharing a milkshake.
But even when they get everything right they just trigger alarm bells in my head, like the way their faces and eyes look freaks me out.
The “uncanny” part I think isn’t because it’s done badly, it’s because it’s done well - but not in any of the ways you’d get from a human. By the time a human artist has learned to get that good at shading, colouring, line work, human figures, posing etc, they’ll have also learned about composition and perspective and good storytelling and when to not pointlessly overload the background with weird shit.
Yeah that scans, its like when it’s taken as a whole it looks off. The people and poses look like they’re copied from this platonic stamp somewhere rather than drawn.
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”.
