it's surprising that the SEC and other regulatory agencies don't intervene on these statements. Not to mention that "cure cancer" is more of a slogan in the sense that cancer comes in countless families and varieties, I don't doubt that progress is possible but to say that "all cancers will be cured in the near future" seems outrageously aggressive / misleading

They likely will once they are public, though it's surprising it is tolerated even at this phase.

Then again orange man president and SpaceX is saying some pretty bonkers stuff.

What do you think it would take to cure all cancers, and what capabilities do you think AI will have within the next decade? Need I remind you that, in the span of five years, AI went from not being able to add to solving Millenium Prize problems?

What would it take for AI to not replicate that in biology? Either curing cancer has to be a much harder problem, which is doubtful given targeted treatments like immunotherapy humans have already stumbled across, or AI progress has to slow down massively, which is doubtful given all the trends say it is speeding up.

My understanding of drug dev is that finding stuff that might work is not the challenge, but verifying how well and with what side effects is.

That verification might start in some simulated computer environment but needs to move into physical wet lab, animal testing and then human testing.

So medicine is quite a bit different than code/math where you have a perfectly verifiable problem space that can be iterated within by AI infinitely.

A good example might be Alzheimer's where the brain plaque was thought to be a cause, lots of research on various ways to prevent or reduce the plaque and then it turns out that doesn't matter at all, or is more a byproduct than a cause of the disease.

edit: In general we have many diseases we don't understand and drugs that work via mechanisms we don't understand. So it seems very hard to have a computer simulation in which AI can test medicine. The simulator work seems like the actual problem to solve, not the invention portion.

I think this is a bit misleading. Less than 10% of phase 1 trials end up passing phase 3 and going to market. You can claim that means the challenge is verifying how well they work since you need to run a bunch of phase 3 trials but I think the real challenge is finding a phase 1 target that will end up passing phase 3. Doing a better job of quickly eliminating bad targets is the real challenge. If AI turns that 10% number into 20% then you can get twice as many marketable drugs for the same number of trials. I guess another way of putting it is that finding stuff that has a small chance of working is not a challenge, but finding stuff that has a good chance of working is a huge challenge.