My guess would be it's not a matter of intelligence but of insufficient data. And not "oh let's scrape more data from the open web" but rather "we need to be able to understand everything going on in incredibly complex biological systems and how each action we take impacts things".

If we figure out a super quantum computer that let's us simulate the human body with 100% physical accuracy, maybe that'll do it.

Yes, mental health problems are not solvable by AI because AI and the conversation around it absolutely contributes to people's mental health problems. People selling the AI are telling the press that it will destroy up to 50% of jobs. It's the largest fear-based marketing campaign in human history, and it's absurd to make these kinds of claims.

AI might cure mental health issues for the people who own it, but it's hard to watch this video and not see some serious mental issues going on with Amodei.

I don’t think we have any way of knowing what is and isn’t solvable by superintelligence.

That’s the whole “singularity” concept.

Though when it comes to medical research, the slowest part is typically running trials on real humans. That part would still be slow.

I don't think people are questioning the ability of AI (or humans) to eventually solve these problems. It's the claim that it will happen in 10 years that is absurd, given the bottleneck of time necessary for lab experiments, manufacturing, clinical trials, and FDA approval. Most drugs take over a decade to go through that process.

For a truly revolutionary therapy with the potential to save millions of people's lives, every drug agency has ways to expedite approvals. They do it all the time. If someone found a legitimate cure for cancer there is no way in hell all the agencies on earth are going to sit on their hands for a decade while their governments spend trillions of dollars treating the disease with SOC

Covid vaccine got approved in 10 months. Of course it was building on tested mRNA tech, but still, there are ways to expedite trials if we think the reward is high enough.

He might have just been saying that the initial discovery that eventually becomes an FDA-approved cure would happen within 10 years. He doesn't really seem like a details kind of person.

How do we even define the problem of “mental illness”? Much less the solution. Super intelligence could be able to reverse engineer these things but I don’t think we know yet that superintelligence in any field is possible so it’s scifi but our economy is riding on the scifi being scifact

I think there's no reason to doubt the viability of 'super-intelligence' though I wouldn't really call it intelligence. There's just so much in so many fields, and humans can only hold a tiny percent of all knowledge in their head at a single time. There's likely plethora of 'obvious' dots we're failing to connect simply because nobody has both of them in their pool of knowledge.

But that's more like super-knowledge-connector. Intelligence would require, at the minimum, be the ability to discover/create things that don't logically follow from anything else. So for example - advancing some esoteric field of mathematics by connecting things in a previously unexplored way = super-knowledge-connector. 'Inventing'/discovering mathematics from nothing = intelligence.

"Dario claims AGI will solve the perpetual motion problem"

That depends if it can be solved using only information.

I will talk about mental illness, because that is my experience (I am disabled with Schizoaffective Bipolar Type, Panic Disorder, and OCD).

No, it will not cure mental illness. Mental Illness is in my genes[1] and I can see it because I have my genetics. My disorder is triggered (important!) by my environment. Stress, high altitude, heat and humidity, high EMFs (yes, I said it) can all trigger episodes.

I am homeless (stress!), so if AI does not fix that, maybe they can invent a different kind of opioid? But that is juts a treatment, not a cure.

Will AI ever recommend diet changes or other environmental changes that have helped me? I need to live in a cold, low altitude environment where I eat a lot or reindeer, salmon, and seal and very few plant foods (Similar to an Inuit diet). These things helped me more than any other drug in my 60 year life.

[1] These genes come from both my Sami heritage and the ancient mitochondrial haplogroup (K1c2a around 7050 BCE). Some of the most impacting genes of my polygenic environmental disorder:

TAAR6, CACNA1C, KCNQ1, SCNA2, NCAN, DNM3, C15orf32, TPH2, CBS, FUT2, FADS1, FADS2, CPT2A, SLC1A1