It's incorrect to say that AI isn't subject to politics, however. That's a choice we can make or not make. I suspect that if Claude existed in the 1980s it would discard the cancer/genetics link as being pro-eugenic racist ideology which has been rejected by the scientific community-- just as many scientists did back then.
I think this is a big reason why we must reject the centralization of AI. Discovery of that one genetic marker has saved countless lives, but it's not something that the scientific community as a whole was going to do then because of eugenics over-correction and similar political factors. Discovery is easily stimmed for the lack of sufficient hetrodox thinking.
But none of that is true? They dont just do what they are told, they go to tangents and ignore instructions. They are subject to optics, politics and profit motive - see Mecha Hitler for simple obvious example.
Definitely spoken like someone who knows real cancer patients and cares about cures and not like someone religiously obsessed with transhumanism.
This can say person who barely used LLM and not understand what is it.
It will ignore instructions, has bias and is censored. Also a provider has profit motive to give you more verbose answer to bill you more tokens.
If you mean that you are unaware of substantial progress in germline genetic engineering, then there are many animal model research studies to consider. You can trivially search for them like "germline mouse longevity". Would they translate directly? Like other mouse science, probably not. Would it require work and effort to continue these directions? Yes.
> There is the whole problem of biology, but LLMs do have one advantage over humans: they just do what they are told and aren't subject to optics, politics, profit motive, etc. Maybe that strengh alone will allow them to surface solutions that would've been buried somewhere along the way otherwise.
Oh, absolutely. There are lots of solutions and low hanging fruit in biology for problems like, say, longevity. We have made mice live significantly longer, several dozen times. But it requires human germline genetic engineering to port to humans, and you can bet that "solution" is pretty heavily tabooed.
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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329717