Re:Eli Lilly CEO pushes back on Dario Amodei's ludicrous med...
by user43928 on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:18PM
(#50490814)
That's not what Amodei is predicting, he does not talk about a scenario where biologists use AI as a tool to double the speed of research.
He is predicting the arrival of powerful AI in the next few years.
His plan is to scale that model up to millions of instances working in parallel, directing experiments and research autonomously.
In this way he hopes to accelerate the rate of important discoveries by at least factor 10 to achieve 100 years worth of progress.
Like, if your optimism is great enough, big enough, then you lose touch with what’s actually feasible. That’s where delusion starts.
It might be possible to compress 100 years of research into 10 years. Maybe. But it won’t be these 10 years.
Check the math. Say we get huge advances in AI tomorrow that double the speed of biology research. And imagine we then have 3 years where research is now 2x faster (which, again, would be absolutely enormous).
How much faster do the remaining 7 years have to be, in order for the entire 10 years to capture 100 years of research? Roughly 13x.
Basically, every year you’re not already at >10x is a year you’re falling behind. And AI is nowhere even remotely close to doubling the speed of research, much less 10x-ing it.