Her comments counter optimistic medical predictions from Sam Altman.
Will AI cure cancer? Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna discusses the hype around AI in medicine and why scientific breakthroughs will still require human ingenuity and a lot of hard work. Watch more on The Circuit with @EmilyChangTV http://bit.ly/3Sh6O0d
Many users endorsed Doudna's claim that human ingenuity remains essential for genuine biological innovation beyond AI pattern matching, while others dismissed her remarks as credentialism or outright damaging to science.
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@LocasaleLab As a researcher, I hope automated experimentation becomes a thing in cell culture rooms. Its a pain to deal with constant contaminations. I wish the whole room to be automated at some point.
@LocasaleLab If only you took your own advice!
Jennifer Doudna being tired of your bullshit is the best thing I've seen today.
Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for gene editing and went on Bloomberg to say the chatbots everyone is betting on cannot innovate at all. Every promise Silicon Valley is making about AI curing disease just hit the one person qualified to check it.
She has spent her whole career inside the actual frontier of curing disease.
So when she talks about what AI can and cannot do in biology, she is not guessing. She is reporting from inside the lab.
Her words were blunt. She is not seeing chatbots innovate. They summarize data. They write reports. They do not come up with a brand new idea nobody has ever had.
Then the interviewer pushed. So you're saying AI can't innovate?
Doudna did not flinch. She does not know if it can't. She just does not see it doing it right now.
This lands harder when you remember who is making the opposite case. Sam Altman says AI will eliminate disease within five years. Larry Ellison says AI will cure cancer in a 48 hour window.
An OpenAI executive even floated that the company should get a cut of sales on any drug discovered through ChatGPT. Doudna answered that in two words. Good luck.
Even the cancer specialists Altman is selling to keep warning that cancer is not one disease but hundreds, each needing its own cure, and that compute does not skip the years of lab work.
Her reason is simpler. Biology is hard. You cannot simulate your way to an understanding of the human body.
The people promising cures are the ones selling the tool.
The person who actually won a Nobel building them is telling you it has not happened yet.
Source: Bloomberg Originals
Watch the full video on their official channel.
@LocasaleLab Would a Mythos level LLM at the start of 20th century and crammed with all the then existing data come up with Einstein's theories on relativity?
@LocasaleLab she is an advisor at Demis Hassabis AI drug company…
"AI" is not one thing. There is traditional symbolic AI; specific Artificial Neural Networks like AlphaFold; and the new LLMs which have human like reasoning. Each different.
Software is one of the toughest things people do. LLMs eat it at the detail level, but not yet conceptually.
None of that is missing from her argument. Or is her argument. Youre responding to Ihtesham Ali’s argument. Please watch the videos you respond to.
Doudna here has not participated in credentialism. That’s not what that word means. Credentialism is when we devalue real education by using degrees and certs as proxies for real knowledge.
Do you think a Nobel does not qualify her to speak on general directions in the biosciences, without claiming to have become a data scientist, software engineer, or mathematician?
@LocasaleLab She is wrong.
@LocasaleLab @DoudnaJennifer i have rarely, if ever, seen a smart woman. @NobelPrize is a hoax. they prime immunotherapy and there are no money left for protein blocking. biology? took fourty years for krason. the ideea to block a precursor is max high school level innovation
@LocasaleLab Funny AI guys claims to cure ALL cancers in 10 years, see @demishassabis
It’s time for doudna to pour some reality water on the hype. She may not know AI at all, but certainly on the other hand AI hypers treating biology as some black n white binary system is also a fail.
@LocasaleLab She's missing the main shift that will allow so much progress. Biology is shifting from a science problem to a tech problem.
I imagine that regulatory hurdles will be the biggest bottleneck and if we don't adapt and improve regulatory processes, development will shift overseas.
@LocasaleLab I agree with nearly everything you write, but I have to part ways with you on this. She's cautious in what she says, especially toward the end. Admittedly, she does not say enough philosophically about biology as a science, which would have given her position more heft.
@LocasaleLab Her stance is quite balanced though, she expressed some skepticism but acknowledges that things may change in the future.
@LocasaleLab I don’t think they’ll be solving biology (and physics as well, necessarily) any time soon but definitely making significant advances like you described.
@LocasaleLab I don’t see what she’s said disagreeing with what you’ve said in a major way…
A controversial opinion indeed! Dario Amodei in one of his interviews already claimed that Claude has started to detect diseases or symptoms which even well trained doctors miss. As these models get trained by more and more data they will get better in detecting patterns that even the brain of a nobel laureate can miss. That's one of the central arguments of "Machines of Loving Grace" which visualises a country of geniuses in a data center!
@business @emilychangtv It's probably going to help immensely, but I think "cure" is a very strong word right now. Human smarts are still the engine behind the breakthroughs.
I definitely think AIs will be capable of innovating, but to be fair to her, she basically is saying she hasn't seen it yet.. but she does not seem to say it will never happen.
She should be honest with herself though, she has not likely actually experienced the most advanced AI systems, only people who work in the labs have. Like "let's give Fable 5 a question and allow it to spend 6 milllion USD worth of tokens thinking about just that one question" level AI. The websites and APIs are tuned for economical answers, not for thinking the hardest or trying to be the most innovative.
@LocasaleLab You’re off the mark on this one. Doudna was a star a decade or more before the Nobel.
But I agree with your general distaste for credentialism. Funnily enough, Yale gave her an honorary PhD at my graduation, which seemed very silly of them.
@LocasaleLab I find that I am using AI with ever increasing frequency. However, I don't feel like it could replace me anytime soon. The level of logic is still lacking. To me, it's more like a force multiplier, allowing me to access information much quicker than I could in the past.
