Re:Eli Lilly CEO pushes back on Dario Amodei's ludicrous med...
by volkercraig on Friday November 13, 2026 @09:55AM
(#50484457)
I think you're thinking that the research process will be something like Dario opening up claude code and typing "Claude, solve cancer, make no mistakes". But that just isn't the case. Consider the ability to develop new tools and software for drug discovery. Consider the advances that google has made with AlphaFold. Consider the ability to crawl mountains more data than every before and finding the smallest hints, tucked away by connecting 6 papers written in 4 languages, published 60 years apart. Bioinformatics is a relatively new field, but when I finished my degree in 2018 the field was still so far behind the cutting edge of computing it was laughable. "state of the art" was dynamic programming algorithms and I remember that the first implementation of blast tools were only just ported to CUDA while I was in class, and that really wasn't that long ago. Protein folding software when I was in school was basically completely manual. You needed to define the structures yourself and then give it a place to start and it would (entirely on cpu) do some sort of gradient descent to give you an approximation of the structure.
The thing that I noticed while I was doing my degree was that the CS people refused to talk to the bio people, and the bio people refused to talk to the CS people. The CS people would go on and make solutions to problems nobody asked, and the bio people would try to solve data problems in complicated ways that made no sense. Overlapping expertise is and was very rare between those two fields. AI however CAN be that bridge, because it can basically turn your average bioinformatician/biologist into a really competent programmer, without them having to give up time away from the work they are actually skilled at.
Maybe I'm just completely AI-psychotic, but I've always been a researcher at heart. I hated doing literature review because it was so frustrating falling through dead ends. These last few months with agents I have been able to go deeper and find better leads than ever before. AI is like having an insanely smart lab partner, available to you 24/7/365. Never gets tired, never has a pissy day, never gets too hungover to read papers. I do legitimately think it's going to accelerate the field so much faster than people expect. I don't know about the 10 year horizon, but I'd love to see it happen, and I'm cheering for them.
The thing that I noticed while I was doing my degree was that the CS people refused to talk to the bio people, and the bio people refused to talk to the CS people. The CS people would go on and make solutions to problems nobody asked, and the bio people would try to solve data problems in complicated ways that made no sense. Overlapping expertise is and was very rare between those two fields. AI however CAN be that bridge, because it can basically turn your average bioinformatician/biologist into a really competent programmer, without them having to give up time away from the work they are actually skilled at.
Maybe I'm just completely AI-psychotic, but I've always been a researcher at heart. I hated doing literature review because it was so frustrating falling through dead ends. These last few months with agents I have been able to go deeper and find better leads than ever before. AI is like having an insanely smart lab partner, available to you 24/7/365. Never gets tired, never has a pissy day, never gets too hungover to read papers. I do legitimately think it's going to accelerate the field so much faster than people expect. I don't know about the 10 year horizon, but I'd love to see it happen, and I'm cheering for them.