It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"
Don't worry, I'm sure that's his next blog post. Right after Claude has finished solving famine and poverty. ;)
How weird that all those humans seem not to trust the logic of their betters ;P
the ultimate utopia
We have more than enough food on the planet for everyone, and we have the ability to deliver bombs or soldiers or amazon packages to anywhere in the world in days or hours. Combine excess food with amazon or army level logistics, and famine is gone.
What people mean when they say “solve famine” is can we make people not starve without actually doing or changing anything - which is of course impossible.
We do this. Have you ever heard of UN World Food Programme? $14B funding in 2022 (since then dropped drastically, guess why).
Has it solved famine? No. Would it solve famine if it got the funding it needs? Unlikely.
Because you cannot just spend billions of dollars to send amazin food parcels across the world and expect that to fix climate change, draught, poverty, colonialism, racism, illiteracy, lack of education, and propably 100 other issues all contributing to the fact that we still have not end hunger. And no, AI won’t solve it either.
So one would expect $14b/year would solve about 14/93 = 15% of world hunger.
> The World Food Programme supports over 152 million people annually and delivers life-saving food assistance where needed most. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Food_Programme)
An estimated 757 million people are food insecure (https://www.who.int/news/item/24-07-2024-hunger-numbers-stub...)
152/757 = the world food program helps ~20% of people who are food insecure. That's well in the ballpark of the estimated 15% spend.
If we spend that extra $93b, we'd be well within the range to actually stop world hunger.
Yes, "climate change, draught, poverty, colonialism, racism, illiteracy, lack of education" are still issues. No, you don't have to solve those problems to feed people. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Almost all recent famines have been caused (either deliberately or incidentally) by government policies, not lack of money. The UN spending 93 BB may (somewhat) improve the situation, but is unlikely to end food insecurity.
Eliminating corrupt leaders (i.e. Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, etc.), and poor regulation (e.g. Bombay Fodder and Grain Control Act, 1939) would be much more effective.
Actually, they were caused by lack of food.
> Eliminating corrupt leaders (i.e. Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, etc.)
Yes, which of the 757 million food insecure people is Putin responsible for their food insecurity?
North Korea has about 26mil residents, so if they were all starving that'd be 3.4% of the food insecure people. Gaza has about 2mil, so we can pin a further 0.03% on shitty governments.
Obviously it'd be great if putin, un and netanyahu were gone. They suck for a variety of reasons. But it doesn't change the fact that we could spend money and feed most of the people who are going hungry
This is a tautology; a lack of food can't be caused by a lack of food, as it is a lack of food.
>"Yes, which of the 757 million food insecure people is Putin responsible for their food insecurity?"
In Putin's case, he has caused the price of food to increase through his war on Ukraine, as the cost of fertilizer makes many agricultural products uneconomical to grow for customers in less-developed nations.
>"But it doesn't change the fact that we could spend money and feed most of the people who are going hungry"
There was food literally rotting away (elsewhere in India) during the 2013 drought in Maharashtra, but it wasn't possible/worth transporting it to the affected region (due to government interference).[1] In places like Bangladesh, recent governments have used famine as a tool for obtaining foreign aid while also exterminating or weakening opposition.[2] During the 1990s North Korean famine, plenty of food was offered to the regime, but it was mostly rejected, and that which was accepted was not widely distributed. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_drought_in_Maharashtra
[2] https://asianews.network/over-a-quarter-of-bangladeshis-suff...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine#Fail...
Mind you, UN’s Food -programme (together with education, progress of farming technologies etc) has been a huge success and hunger has dropped historically low. I couldn’t find data on how Trump’s cuts have affected the levels, but I doubt it has been a positive change by any regard.
Going back to the original allegory, just like cancer, hunger is a vastly complex problem with strong political ties (why have still have we not illegalised cigarettes for instance?) and no gee-wiz tech gadget, even as expensive as LLM model, will solve neither of them.
[1] https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/mississippi
I am arguing nothing except that it’s possible if we are willing to spend the money. No AGI is required to come up with a magic solution. It literally just requires spending a lot of money.
> Look at it this way, would Trump end hunger in Mississippi (about 600k people) if, say, Luxemburg would donate USA anout $400m required to end it[1]?
Probably not. But would trump step in and prevent luxemburg from stocking mississippi’s food banks? Could luxemburg send containers of non-perishable food to community centers in every city in the state?
> Has it solved famine? No.
Hoist by your own petard
You know that saving millions of lives every year is better than NOT saving millions of lives, right? Just because something doesn't solve the problem 100% doesn't mean it's not VERY VERY good.
It is possible to prevent most viruses by recoding the human genome (requires embryo engineering or pre-embryo engineering) to use alternate codons that existing natty viruses don't use. This wouldn't prevent synthetic viruses from being developed that use the alternate codons, of course. See (1) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2016-05-10/ultr... and (2) https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/hgp-write/2017-05-09/ultr... and (3) https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1720875112541364535 for some background.
As for "curing cancer", I suspect that Anthropic or OpenAI will use their high status/reputation to launder the existing solutions (germline, p53, enhanced DNA damage repair pathways, higher tumor-suppressor-to-oncogene copy number, more robust tumor-suppressor networks, more self-anti-cancer apoptosis, CD47 suppression, etc) that society has refused to accept. They might have enough reputation to get people to look at these ideas. It won't cure people with stage 5 turbo-cancer a.k.a the walking dead, but hopefully we won't be moving the goal posts _that_ much on them.
"Synthetic genomes unveil the effects of synonymous recoding" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.16.599206v1
"Probing the limits of genetic recoding using multi-omics-guided evolution" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-74300-9
"Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code" https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.ady4368
Is it a product available to humans at all?
A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor burden per unit time from whatever causes vs. the immune system's capacity to detect and destroy them per unit time. As humans age, the balance tips in one direction. If the balance is too far off for too long, tumors accumulate, doctors take notice, and assign whatever labels to the condition.
Looking into particular causes of tumors (and calling each cause its own cancer) can create a vast research program that employs a lot of people, since there are so many mutations that lead to tumors. But interrupting the development of a particular mutation is not going to have the same society-changing effect that solving the fundamental issue of rates would.
Literally first phrase on Cancer Wikipedia entry.... [1]
"Cancer is a group of diseases involving uncontrolled cell growth typically resulting in tumors with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body...."
I'm inclined to believe that the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually complicated. I would be surprised if the thing - that everyone intelligent says is complicated - is actually simple.
This is almost like an application of the conspiracy theory gambit where you try to find out how many people would have to be "in on it" in order to disprove the theory's likelihood. Like flat earth.
Also, not even all cancers have tumors. You have solid tumor oncologists and then oncologists who specialize in blood and lymphatic cancers, “liquid cancers”.
In addition, cancer does not arise from one mutation. It’s a set of mutations that allow cancer to occur. You need mutations for growth, mutations for preventing cellular death, mutations for stealing energy, mutations for hiding from the immune system. Your body, right now, has probably millions of cells that could be candidates for cancer. They either kill themselves or your immune system nukes them. You really need the stars to align on this stuff to get actual cancer.
And then, it’s not like the cancer stops mutating. Cancer becomes resistant to chemotherapy through mutations. Cancer is “smart”, it will even temporary slow its own growth (metabolism) to intake less chemotherapy through treatment.
Here's another way of framing things that might encourage better discussion: Suppose in a few years, it was announced that an LLM did discover a cure for a cancer. What approach would you expect it to have taken?
1. Developing an intervention for every possible mutation that leads to loss of cellular identity, and uncontrolled growth.
2. Preserving immune function later into life.
3. Preserving genetic and epigenetic accuracy later into life.
Maybe it will be 1. But I would bet on 2 or 3. Which both assume that by reducing the difference between rates, the phenomenon of cancer could be reduced or eliminated.
Also: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/07/30/google-kills-alphafold-so...
Or, even better, they never even respond to surging memory costs by saying, "Don't worry, our brilliant AI will figure out how to produce cheaper memory." Because they know it won't.
I genuinely don't know how to interpret the bizarre clichés these people think in. Cure cancer. Make death optional! I can't tell if they're crazy, stupid, or liars.
Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think charities exist to exist. They don't have a strong incentive to actually deliver on their mission. Everyone at the org may be fully bought it and obviously want to cure cancer, but as an organization it would fail to deliver on the promise. Like most organisms, their actual purpose is to continue to be influential, grow and continue to exist.
I think cancer will be solved by some group that could make a lot of money solving cancer. The probability of any one path working is very low so the payout would have to be very large for anyone to be willing to pursue.
I mean, yes, "I haven't looked into the specifics, but working from the first principles I came up with in 3 seconds, cancer research charities are in fact cancer on society" does come off a bit reductively cynical.
If you can find and patent a cure to cancer, you can charge whatever you want for it, at least in the US. I don’t think profit would be an issue.
And even if ending chemotherapy would discourage the incumbents, smaller companies would love the opportunity to kill them.
For example, Polaroid didn’t want to embrace digital cameras since they made tons of money selling physical film. But all the smaller camera companies didn’t care, since they weren’t benefiting from that and wanted to just take Polaroid’s market share. And that’s why digital cameras took off regardless.
If a big public charity is able to cure a cancer type (eg. lung cancer), then it's next aim would be to try cure another cancer type. Let's just say they are somehow able to cure all the cancers, and therefore they cured cancer, then there's distribution of the cure, with a focus on 1st world but then it would have to go to developing nations too. Along the way, there may be issues that arise in recovery from the cure, so money towards helping survivors there. Shift goal, shift goal, shift distribution/priority of donations, on and on and on. For the proper charities that do want to meet their goals, something like this is what they'd do.
In Canada, measles cases suddenly exploded in 2025 as well, and they don't have RFK Jr. there: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/
The policies around measles vaccines have shifted a little since RFK became HHS Secretary, but not in a material way. Generally the messaging has focused on putting measles, mumps, and rubella in individual vaccines rather than combined, but at no point has the federal government recommended not to get vaccinated. That, combined with the Canadian data, implies that RFK or other changes to US health policy are not likely to be the cause of the measles outbreaks.
There are charities that specialize in analyzing climate data to see where outbreaks may occur next. There are charities that just do government outreach to leaders that don't believe medicine is real.
If you want a simpler example that doesn't involve biotech research, I would just look at the diversity of animal welfare organizations, and their relative quality. Some of the best animal welfare organizations in terms of impact are local rescues run by (in my experience) spouses of wealthy career-people (executives, lawyers, etc.) who have a ton of free time and love animals. But then there are also plenty of animal welfare organizations with questionable motives, and questionable spending patterns - bordering on fraud and embezzlement, if not outright fraud and embezzlement.
It will become victim of the conflict between its core search for truth, the current administration mandate to spy on its own prompts for approval, and secret orders to hide the mission true purpose, like that other computer we have heard about.
All of those guys think people are stupid. That theme has been repeating over and over again.
Nixon was 24% when he resigned, which is amusingly not actually the lowest, as Truman seems to have twice achieved a spot rating of 22, though Nixon remains the lowest rating for a full year. I wonder what Truman did to be less liked than Nixon. Those were both well after dropping bombs on Japan and before the first H-bomb test.
> quite stupid
No. It's partisanship and polarization, which has little to do with intelligence.
But there's one thing that I know is stupid: assuming the reason opposite pole doesn't do what you think they should is because they're full of stupids.
Liberal or conservative, left or right, authoritarian or libertarian, it doesn't matter: if you (still) think Trump is the right man for the job, then you are either a criminal or other subversive agent, a glassy-eyed cultist, or stupid.
Failure to call out stupidity when we see it is no virtue, to paraphrase Goldwater. It is costing us everything we built as a society over the last 250 years.
No. I personally don't like Trump, and looking forward to the day he's gone, but:
1. Thinking of your opponents are stupid (or some kind of cartoon villain) is itself a really stupid attitude to take. It might feel righteous, but it blinds you. Some of them may actually be literally stupid, but there's no value in even thinking about them.
Looked at objectively, there's also lot of stupid on all sides. See: much of the Democrats'/progressives' reaction to Trump.
2. Approval is complicated. It's not a choice made in a vacuum. American politics nowadays is (for many people) a choice between the best of bad options. Partisanship exacerbates it, because it makes many of the alternatives seem even more loathsome.
3. Not everyone is a news junkie, and expressing approval of Trump (for instance), may not be even meant to be an evaluation of his job performance.
4. etc.
What he is saying makes sense to me.
Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain?
Or do you think he is wrong and that applying AI to this kind of research cannot possibly produce a breakthrough and lead to a cure?
> Do you not think that Amodei, who worked on research about cancer biomarkers at Stanford, knows a thing or two about how to apply AI to the problem?
It certainly shows he is ambitious.
> Is it that you don't trust a single word he says and that he lies for financial gain?
Yes.
> Or do you think he is wrong and that applying AI to this kind of research cannot possibly produce a breakthrough and lead to a cure?
It is possible, but both could be true, that's not an exclusive or situation.
I am not familiar with Amodei's personal history, but I generally do not assume the worst of people just because they are extremely successful, like many others here seem to do.
Between Musk, Altman, Schmidt, Amodei, Gates and a bunch of others I have a really hard time figuring out who is the least ethical. Probably Musk. But it may well be that the long term damage done by Amodei and Altman is larger. Ask me again in 10 years, if I'm still around.
I see the conflict of interest of course, but so far I have not seen anything that convinced me Amodei works towards any other goal than benefit for humanity as a whole, like he claims.
if many other see it as substantial ground, and you just say "I don't see anything", how do you think this discussion can go forward?
It's amazing that I even have to ask for it, as if I am just supposed to believe so.
Alternatively, one could also engage with my argument that Amodei's position seems consistent with his beliefs, and point out flaws with it.
As for "bad person" is concept you brought to discussion, it could mean many things, but you were provided with enough ground from opposite point of view.
> It's amazing that I even have to ask for it, as if I am just supposed to believe so.
toxicity only adds to your character of bias and denial.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175827
The sbf vibes are on the nose. Remember that it was a big deal that sbf bought into Anthropic, and many if not most Anthropic employees are EA, the tribe of people I'd rather call "rationalizists". The main thing they rationalize, is of course themselves taking on power and what sbf made famous as uh the linear approach to risk
Between Altman and Amodei, I'd say that Amodei is the more dangerous just because he seems even more "reasonable" to nonjerks. You should ask the mods which one of the two they think are more reasonable. It's clear to lobbyists and politicians --- people familiar with the human jungle that is DC--- that Amodei is weirder, though.
I think I have a good metric for who is least ethical. Which one on your list is most unlikely to write good satire (or most likely to write unintentional self-satire?)
I'd say its Schmidt, followed by Amodei, and then Musk. See Musk on SNL. I think Gates had some TV appearances where he was reasonably funny, almost self-deprecating.
If you ask me, SBF ran an obvious scam in a sector that is as a whole a scam.
With Anthropic's product, I experience a real benefit today.
This reminds me of the myth of Prometheus. I think most Greek thinkers would agree that Prometheus was the hero, and Hephaestus was a complete jerk, even though one created fire and the other merely stole it. Of course they had to make up a punishment for Prometheus so that he could earn his status the meritocratic way..
Probably much against most people here, I separate the product from the person creating it. As another Anthropic example, there was the math guy at Anthropic who disproved a long running conjecture.. it doesn't look like he's getting Fable and Anthropic the respect he thinks they deserve. The process matters.
People are sensitive to disrespect hardcoded in the process, especially against "tried and true" norms, and in most cases they are right. The ability to write satire could be a kind of razor to tell apart the influencers who are likely to be righter than their detractors
The Fable quota on the $200 personal plan could be higher, but the difference to Opus 5 or 5.6 Sol is not large enough to gain any real benefit from unlimited access to Fable, for my use.
From what I heard their internal 'Model 2' is hardly much better, but hopefully they will have something newer soon.
You don't become a CEO of a company like Anthropic (or any sufficiently large company) without lying for financial gain
And they’ll be using detailed medical records. Personalized medicine and the use of ML in medicine has been around longer than LLMs (and will continue regardless). There is a lot more data available than just studies and textbooks.
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/pers...
"If you or a loved one have taken a class of drugs known as GLP-1, you may be entitled to compensation..."
A) verifiable proof generation (a limited closed set of axioms and a minimal algorithm like Metamath's are enough to verify correct vs incorrect machine intuition, plus feeding back the rejection/acceptance to adjust the machine intuition)
B) optimizing an illposed problem (how do we define the inaccessible fitness function)
Yes the field of biology or medicine will advance faster, but only because the mathematics and physics will advance faster, any non-axiomatic or non-postulate ramifications actually depend on unknown variables like fitness functions etc. How do you model the environment? That model will necessarily be oversimplified. What makes us believe that a long tail of ever less frequent distinct failure modes (like cancers, cancer is not a single problem) can not be guessed. It would require oracles and crystal balls: if global warming brings malaria mosquito's up north, then "eliminating sickle cell anemia" can actually turn into a death sentence instead of a life-long disease, but perhaps malaria will not come to higher latitudes, it depends on the future!
> This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid.
I mean, if Claude actually cures cancer, I do think he'll be right.
The only problem is that you need to actually cure cancer.
This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid.
First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet. They all obtain donations on the basis of "together, we will cure cancer" messaging. They all fund the best science they can.
Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks and academic papers as you like, but the reality on the hospital ward will always be different. Why do you think student doctors have to spend so many years "doing the rounds" Dario ? They are all academically smart, they are all capable of memorizing text books ... but there is no substitute for seeing and doing the reality.
I barely trust Claude to write code, let alone find a cure to cancer.