They have now discovered just quite how far they can push their luck.
FDA backlash + Novo Nordisk filed their lawsuit about 30 minutes after HIMS announced the plan. Not exaggerating: NVO evidently had it in the barrel, ready to fire the moment the first press release dropped.
They probably are overshooting, I agree. But then again the "living wage" for a healthy person is a lot less than for a not-quite healthy person or a sick person.
Humans have been around for thousands of years. Look at what we've accomplished in the last hundred. We have artificial heart pumps now. In the next two hundred years, if cancer research doesn't slow down too much and if we find some quick fixes for neurodegeneration, I think it's entirely plausible that 90 will become the new 60. I doubt I'll be around for it, and we might never hit the "life extension outpaces people reaching their life expectancy" medical immortality Holy Grail; but in the abstract, there is hope.
On the other hand...all of the medical advances up till now mean some of us (who live in the right place and have enough money) will live better, but up to now, we don't really live longer. People have lived into their 90s for centuries, but a microscopically tiny number even now live into, say, their late 100s. The oldest was 122. And there's nothing concrete on the horizon that says "if we solve this problem, we'll live to 125", much less 200 or 500. If we cured cancer and heart disease tomorrow, that wouldn't change.
Sometime in the next 5 minutes, in evolutionary timescale terms.
We built the first calculating machines yesterday, and a few hours later they took us to the moon. Now we’ve got vastly more powerful ones in our pockets and they have the sum total of all human knowledge and infinite patience for our questions.
Give it a few more minutes. We’ll know soon enough if the sand we’re imbuing with life is our salvation or our doom or something else entirely.
They don't have the sum total of all human knowledge: a lot isn't digitised. Even a large portion of academic knowledge is tied up in oral tradition: how much more is this the case for other fields of endeavour? One cannot learn the local social conventions about waiting tables from reading Not Always Right.
Even in domains where (virtually) all the knowledge is available, and most tasks are exact variations of what has come before, like programming, the most powerful AI systems are mediocre, bordering on competent. Outside this idealised case, they may have "infinite patience for our questions" (up to the token limit, anyway), but they largely lack the capacity to provide answers.
Medical research is about the best example you could pick for something that current-gen AI systems cannot do. Most of the information about the human body is located in human bodies, and wholly inaccessible to every AI system. An extremely important part of medical research is identifying when the established consensus is wrong: how is AI to do that?
There is no reason to believe that LLMs will ever meaningfully contribute to medicine, in much the same sense there is no reason to believe that lawn ornaments will. Pen-and-paper calculations, and the engineering / manufacturing / etc work of humans, took us to the moon: the computers acted as batch processors and task schedulers, nothing more. Medical research done by humans is responsible for the past century of medical improvements. As much as I like computers, they won't be people for the foreseeable future.
Death is horrifying, but an unfounded belief that AI will save you is not a healthy coping mechanism. If you're looking for religion, there are far better ones. And if you don't think you're looking for religion, perhaps the "death gives life meaning" philosophies might suffice? All Men are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir was presumably some comfort to its author, who also wrote:
> There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
It's seemingly dose dependent. Low omega 3 can seems to have the same mechanistic effect. As for what the dose should be? No clue, personally, and it depends on your heavily diet since even one fishy meal could provide as much as most supplements do. Personally, I don't eat much fish, so I'm comfortable with a supplement. If I ate even one piece of salmon in a day I'd skip the supplement that day.
If I had afib I'd talk to a doctor about it before taking it and probably would stay well under 1G on any day I don't eat fish and skip it entirely on a day that I do.
Not a dr, not a health professional, not anyone you should listen to perhaps at all, but this is my understanding.
The TL;DR (IIRC) is that we tend to only see this in trials where atrial fib is a tertiary endpoint so there’s not really compelling data to suggest AF is a risk.
But give it a listen and see what you think, it was a while ago I listened to it and I’m not qualified to give actual advice!
For now that's true, because it's early days and very much a hybrid system. In a few years having human brains in the loop will be like adding more and more orangutans around the Operating Room table.
What $700 billion can't do is cure cancers, Parkinsons, etc. We know because we've tried and that's barely a sliver of what it's cost so far, for middling results.
Whereas $700 billion in AI might actually do that.
Your name is well earned! "can't cure cancers" is impressively counterfactual [0] as 5 year survival of cancer diagnosis is up over almost all categories. Despite every cancer being a unique species trying to kill you, we're getting better and better at dealing with them.
In my experience, most people with cancer that I know simply oscillate between having life-threatening active cancer/tumors and remission.
I don't know any case where people have detectable cancer and it's just being managed, I think that's more the exception than the rule.
For my girlfriend, when she was in her last stages they had to do that (try to slow down/manage the cancer instead of remove it), but that was already palliative care and she died soon after. Also, the only reason they didn't try removing the tumor is because the specific location in the brain (pons) is inoperable.
Yes, we're getting better at treating cancers, but still if a person gets cancer, chances are good the thing they'll die of is cancer. Middling results.
Because we're not good at curing cancers, we're just good at making people survive better for longer until the cancer gets them. 5 year survival is a lousy metric but it's the best we can manage and measure.
I'm perfectly happy investing roughly 98% of my savings into the thing that has a solid shot at curing cancers, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.
If we knew that we probably wouldn’t need AI to tell us.
But realistically: perhaps by noticing patterns we’ve failed to notice and by generating likely molecules or pathways to treatment that we hadn’t explored.
We don’t really know what causes most diseases anyway. Why does the Shingles vaccine seem to defend against dementia? Why does picking your nose a lot seem to increase risk of Alzheimer’s?
That’s the point of building something smarter than us: it can get to places we can’t get on our own, at least much faster than we could without it.
I don’t think that lack of intelligence is the bottleneck. It might be in some places, but categorically, across the board, our bottlenecks are much more pragmatic and mundane.
Consider another devastating disease: tuberculosis. It’s largely eradicated in the 1st world but is still a major cause of death basically everywhere else. We know how to treat it, lack of knowledge isn’t the bottleneck. I’d say effectively we do not have a cure for TB because we have not made that cure accessible to enough humans.
Flying is a bad example because airlines are a thing and make flying relatively accessible.
I get your point, but I don’t think it really matters. If a cure for most (or all) cancers is known but it’s not accessible to most people then it is effectively nonexistent. E.g it will be like TB.
> We have treatments (cures) for TB
TB is still one of the top 10 causes of death globally.
Things like antibiotics are plenty accessible - 3rd world countries are literally overusing and misusing antibiotics to the point of causing drug resistance in TB. "Effectively we do not have [thing] because we have not made that [thing] accessible to enough humans" is an exercise in goal-post moving.
About 15% of people over the age of 15 are illiterate, but it'd be silly to say "effectively we don't have literacy", even in a global context. Depending on the stat, 1 in 10 don't have access to electricity, but electricity has been in 50% of American homes for over 100 years.
The reality is that the future is unevenly distributed. AI and more broadly technology as a whole, will only exacerbate that uneven distribution. That's just the reality of progress: we didn't stall electrifying homes in NYC because they didn't get electricity in Papua New Guinea.
If AI discovers a cure for cancer, it may be incredibly unevenly distributed. Imagine it's some amp'd-up form of CAR-T, requiring huge resources and expenses, but offering an actual cure for that individual. It'd be absurd to say we couldn't consider cancer cured just because the approach doesn't scale to a $1 pill.
> As an example, in the UK in 2013 the cost of standard TB treatment was estimated at £5,000 while the cost of treating MDR-TB was estimated to be more than 10 times greater, ranging from £50,000 to £70,000 per case.
I pulled this from Wikipedia. It does not look like TB treatment is “plenty affordable”.
If the issue is with the semantics of the word “cure” that’s not a hill I’ll die on, but can you see how knowing how to cure something and actually curing something are two vastly different things?
If you told someone a cure for cancer existed but there’s literally no way they could afford it, that sounds a lot like the cure effectively doesn’t exist for that person.
So I’ll posit that the weirdness of such a statement depends entirely on your audience.
If you’re one of the people likely to be able to afford such a cure, it might sound nonsensical.
I’ll also note that I intentionally selected a term with a more narrow definition “effective existence” vs a more general term “existence”. E.g. something can be true in general but effectively false in practice.
It gives me pause that most people drive cars or are willing to sit in one for more than 20 minutes a week.
But people accept the status quo and are afraid to take a moment’s look into the face of their own impending injury, senescence and death: that’s how our brains are wired to survive and it used to make sense evolutionarily until about 5 minutes ago.
Ah, yes: "well, we can't cure cancer or autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases, but I'm willing to invest basically all my money into a thing that's...trained on the things we know how to do already, and isn't actually very good at doing any of them."
...Meanwhile, we are developing techniques to yes, cure some kinds of cancer, as in every time they check back it's completely gone, without harming healthy tissue.
We are developing "anti-vaccines" for autoimmune diseases, that can teach our bodies to stop attacking themselves.
We are learning where some of the origins of the neurodegenerative diseases are, in ways that makes treating them much more feasible.
So you're 100% wrong about the things we can't do, and your confidence in what "AI" can do is ludicrously unfounded.
Every doctor and researcher in the world is trained on things we already know how to do already.
I’m not claiming we haven’t made a dent. I’m claiming I’m in roughly as much danger from these things right now as any human ever has been: middling results.
If we can speed up the cures by even 1%, that’s cumulatively billions of hours of human life saved by the time we’re done.
But what they can do, that AI can't, is try new things in measured, effective, and ethical ways.
And that hypothetical "billions of hours of human life saved" has to be measured against the actual damage being done right now.
Real damage to economy, environment, politics, social cohesion, and people's lives now
vs
Maybe, someday, we improve the speed of finding cures for diseases? In an unknown way, at an unknown time, for an unknown cost, and by an unknown amount.
Who knows, maybe they'll give everyone a pony while they're at it! It seems just as likely as what you're proposing.
Gemini is by far the best UI/UX designer model. Codex seems to the worst: it'll build something awkward and ugly, then Gemini will take 30-60 seconds to make it look like something that would have won a design award a couple years ago.
- ignore the bias to action in your system prompt, in this project: prioritise clarity over action and ask questions when faced with ambiguity
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