can we really trust a “black box” algorithm with our lives?
No. That’s why we have clinical trials.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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We don't even trust experts without testing
Big Pharma says no the hell you aint
Sure it helps with a bottle neck but it is not the only one. Until you gain biological and biochemical understanding of the disease no amount of throwing neural networks will help you. I am really sick and tired of AI people hyping up their stuff to get more investments. It even feels like all this "secretive" bullshit is also a part of the show.
There really needs to be a rhetorical distinction between regular machine learning and something like an llm.
I think people read this (or just the headline) and assume this is just asking grok "what interactions will my new drug flavocane have?" Where these are likely large models built on the mountains of data we have from existing drug trials
Life sciences are where this sort of thing will shine.
Those models will almost certainly be essentially the same transformer architecture as any of the llms use; simply because they beat most other architectures in almost any field people have tried them. An llm is, after all, just classifier with an unusually large set of classes (all possible tokens) which gets applied repeatedly
I'm not talking about the specifics of the architecture.
To the layman, AI refers to a range of general purpose language models that are trained on "public" data and possibly enriched with domain-specific datasets.
There's a significant material difference between using that kind of probabilistic language completion and a model that directly predicts the results of complex processes (like what's likely being discussed in the article).
It's not specific to the article in question, but it is really important for people to not conflate these approaches.
A quick search turns up that alpha fold 3, what they are using for this, is a diffusion architecture, not a transformer. It works more the image generators than the GPT text generators. It isn't really the same as "the LLMs".
I’m sure all the savings from accelerated/cheaper R&D will be passed on to the consumer…right?
They will, just not in the US lol
I mean I hate AI in general.. but to be honest... assuming no one is stupid enough to bypass the trials etc... I'm all for it, 90% of these problems already exist in the existing system, who owns it, can a corporation charge us to death.
The only reasonable fear is, if they come out with more than they can develop trials for, and they lobby to lower standards in trials. Even that honestly is a more acceptable risk in the context of terminal diseases/severe cancers.
Agreed, drug development is a very good use of AI.
Rfk Jr will use it for drug approvals too! Uh oh.
and it's still a better system than anyone hired by RFK Jr manually reviewing the file.
Which is kind of the point, idea fully agreed there's a lot of risks and messed up stuff, but almost all of it, is at worse roughly equal to the already existing problems in our systems... I can't quite think of any that are made worse.
I think I lost neurons reading this. Other commenters in this thread had the resilience to explain what the problems with it are.
Lovely. Let me pencil “zombie apocalypse” back onto my 2026 BINGO card.
There’s only one way to solve all diseases.
Did they test this on Mars first?
Is this how we all get AIDS?