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So where's that miraculous cure, then? (europe.pub)
submitted 5 days ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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[–] 82 points 5 days ago (13 children)

Breakthroughs like this WILL come from AI. But...

  1. They're not going to come from LLMs or image generating AIs.
  2. They're not going to come from the numbnuts generating comics in his bedroom - they'll come from real scientists.
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  • [–] 19 points 5 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 5 days ago (8 children)

    It's going to come from scientists who know how to use ML to supplement their work. Also I don't think we are finding cure for cancer as a drug. Only cure I think may work 100% we master fully controllable nanotech that can also read DNA non invasively.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 days ago (4 children)

    Never going to happen.

    Cancer isn't one disease, it's a series of different diseases for each organ.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 days ago

    There are basically infinite cancers if you think about it since mutations and damages are totally casual

    (To be noted: i know very little about cancer so i may be wrong and basing this comment on a probably misconception we laymen have)

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  • [–] -2 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    Cancers are one thing: cells dividing beyond the limit. This is a DNA problem, made worse by existing mutations. Turns out LLMs are getting really good really fast at biology. So why then is it “never going to happen”? What’s the blocker?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 child)

    I think I may not have written my comment in the most coherent way possible.

    My first sentence was a reply to "nanotechnology". It's one of these sci-fi technologies that simply can't happen. You won't suddenly have atomic-scale supercomputers floating around being able to somehow unravel DNA AND have the capacity to edit it.

    It's just not how matter behaves at those scales.

    My second sentence still stands. I do agree that some kind of large scale data attack to the problem will help.

    But the solutions won't be magical "Fantastic Voyage" nanorobots shooting Ant Man lasers at cells.

    It will likely be a whole panoply of attacks on cancer cells, cis-platin with special spike proteins that need all kinds of external inputs to work (you're not downloading them and 3D printing that), or some other cancers may respond to pumped-up antibodies.

    etc

    I do hope that our new data processing heavy-lifters will also help with anti-aging and life extension.

    ya feel me?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    I agree. I was responding to the cancer thing rather than nanobots.

    The thing is, when you look small enough, cancer and aging share a cause: DNA issues. You don’t need nanobots for this, we already have methods of editing DNA today. All we need to know is what to change, something easier said than done.

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  • [–] -1 points 5 days ago* (2 children)

    Honestly, there is potential to 'cure cancer with (help from) "AI".'

    1: You take a DNA test (simple cheek swab or whatever) to identify your particular genetic risk factors might be. Or a small biopsy is done to sample some of the tumor itself and figure out exactly what kind of cancer it is. Just a needle would work, assuming it's somewhere a needle could reach. Only need a microscopic sample of it. Or if it has already metastasized into the bloodstream, a simple blood sample would do.

    2: This genetic information is fed into a purpose-built AI (not an LLM) that's trained to identify the particular strain of cancer and match it with a custom-designed drug cocktail that will target that very specific cancer mutation perfectly.

    3: The drug combination is synthesized, and you now have the perfect medication to combat exactly the strain of cancer you have.

    The problem with 'curing cancer' is that there's millions of different kinds of cancer, millions of different mutations and genetic risk factors that can combine in different ways to produce different cancers that respond to different treatments. We already have 'cured' a few specific types of cancer -- a few specific strains that we already have found solutions to. But researching and developing a solution like that takes monumental effort and a ton of money and time. It's just not feasible to do for all the different kinds of cancer out there. If an AI could do that part quickly and easily, that might give us access to 'cures' for nearly every type of cancer, instead of just a few out of millions.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

    2: This genetic information is fed into a purpose-built AI (not an LLM) that’s trained to identify the particular strain of cancer and match it with a custom-designed drug cocktail that will target that very specific cancer mutation perfectly.

    The "trained to identify the particular strain of cancer and match it with a custom-designed drug cocktail" is the magical thinking part of your idea - basically the "???" step of the three steps to Profit of the underpant gnomes.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

    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

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  • [–] 4 points 5 days ago*

    Well, as I explained in a post above, AI (so, not LLMs or other generative shit) is pretty limited in what it can research and as of right now can't do anything for which there isn't a single concrete research direction with some kind of algorithmic validator for the solutions or where results can't be reached in a couple of days.

    Further, there is no evidence that it ever WILL - maybe it will, maybe it won't: it's at best a possibility with an unquantified probability of happening.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 days ago

    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.

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