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An AI That Promises to "Solve All Diseases" Is About to Test Its First Human Drugs (gizmodo.com)

submitted 22 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Deep inside Alphabet, the parent company of Google, a secretive lab is working on a promise so audacious it sounds like science fiction: to “solve all diseases.” The company, Isomorphic Labs, is now preparing to start its first human clinical trials for cancer drugs designed entirely by artificial intelligence.

In a recent interview with Fortune, Colin Murdoch, President of Isomorphic Labs and Chief Business Officer of Google DeepMind, confirmed the company is on the verge of this monumental step. For anyone who has watched a loved one battle a devastating illness, the hope this offers is immense. But for a public increasingly wary of AI’s power, it raises a chilling question: can we really trust a “black box” algorithm with our lives?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 21 hours ago

Yes. If there's any one thing that pisses me off about the latest "AI" bubble, it may be that... AI has been around for decades, and has been useful for decades while this "GenAI" scam BS is taking center stage.

I took a course in college named "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" in like 2005. In that course, I learned about the A* algorithm which is used among other purposes by games to let NPC's navigate from point A to point B potentially around obstacles or over terrain of different passability. That shit is genuinely useful and bears no resemblence to LLMs or Stable Diffusion. And yet it was called "AI" back in... like the 1960s and was still called "AI" in 2005. Probably still is in college courses around the world.

Now, I haven't read the article, but I'd have to hope nobody put too much blind faith in the AI's output here. But the right tools in the hands of sufficiently well-educated scientists, be they called "AI" or not, can certainly assist in things like drug development.

Oh, also, you can call just about anything that's done with code "AI" even if it really has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. My employer was fairly recently sold an automated customer service tool by a big, well-known software vendor that another team I work distantly with had to configure/program, every step from soup to nuts. (There was absolutely no machine learning involved or anything like that. This other team had to decide all the flows the customers could go through.) But you can bet your ass you couldn't read any three consecutive words in any of their marketing materials about it without at least one of the three being "AI".

I'm sure there are microwave ovens no more sophisticated than the one I have (spoiler: it's the dumbest microwave oven I could find) that are being marketed with the term "AI".