That also aligns with my (non-medical-expert) intuition.
Dario et al are smart enough to know that as well, and they have not presented any compelling counterargument to the speed of biology, which makes me they that they are full of shit and know it.
I'm not saying both cases are equivalent, but A LOT can change in 10 years, specially since the acceleration is compounding over time.
Today we're using the absolute worst models that we're going to use in the next 10 years.
Depending on "several years" -> it is almost by definition impossible. The trial periods are too long.
A lot of major breakthroughs have happened recently and are already in the pipeline, looking promising.
There's a lot of progress on this stuff already. Compared to 10-20-30 years ago, a lot of diseases already look "cured", even if they aren't completely.
Near immediate death sentences have become 5-10+ years of life expectations, etc.
I don't see any reason why AI wouldn't help speed things up in the future.
But we won't see any of that for "several years" regardless.
Amodei says whatever keeps the money rolling in.
But if that's Dario's argument, he should be making it see how well investors take to the "I believe I'm leading an organization in building a god" approach.
[1] I think that's a fair word for something that can simulate the workings of the physical world from first principles
It's crazy how AI has completely reversed who is technology optimistic and who is not.
A 60-year-old immigrant medical researcher thinks we live in the most exciting time in history and that all major diseases will be cured within a decade.
A 29-year-old American zillennial genderfluid medical researcher thinks Dario and Sam Altman are demonic creatures, worse than the devil himself.
How did this happen?
I mean... that's literally Amodei. But anywho.
We just went through this with coding: We are setting up a silly strawman, that will be goal posted to the end of the world. I am relatively certain Amodei does not literally mean "Will you flip AI on, go to sleep, and get a "cancer" pill at your door some day x in the future, all just AI?". Yes, it will involve humans.
It's what AI enables, in combination what exists. This might also include changes in regulation (which to me seems like the bottleneck, much more so than speed of the human body).
Maybe, or maybe someone needs to send him this comic:
And that makes it more enraging to see the cultists and charlatans running the AI labs using the heartbreak so many people experience because of it as a way to accumulate vast amounts of power.
It is worth noting that of the 3 things you listed, none are a single disease. They're all descriptions of a wide range of conditions, and that aligns with my understanding of aging in general: so much stuff goes wrong that rather than describe the individual source, we describe its effects.
"Cure" probably means "If we find it quickly enough we can eliminate it", but after some time, you'll see popup fast moving cancers everywhere. Curing certain kinds of cancer would be a nobel winning prize, but it doesn't eliminate all cancers, either.
Cardiovascular disease like athlerosclerois have been proposed as being curable.
I suspect "dementia/alzheimers" is like cancer - many separate kinds/issues, and we'll eliminate some but not all.
Claude will cure old age too, of course.
we could eliminate all disease, but without solving senescence itself I don't think it's possible to achieve even 200 year lifespans. by 70, even the most blessed of us begin to rapidly fall apart.
mind upload is far more plausible than fixing the janky meat machines we inhabit.
"In other fields [coding, math] the experts said Amodei was wrong. He proved to be right. In this field experts are saying Amodei is wrong, therefore he will be proven to be right."
That's as simple of a summary as I can given without getting into the details, which are irrelevant and devolve into nit-picking regarding specific wording used (can vs. will), who said and what was really said (or was not said), and so on.
To me, that argument is not good enough. I would like to hear something a bit more step-by-step as to why people think he is right or wrong that's beyond mere "because he said so" takes.
>> In a 42-minute IPO roadshow video the company released on Tuesday, Amodei made the audacious prediction that "cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, mental illness — these will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade."
Mental illness? I'm sure that will be worked out exactly a day after AI-induced psychosis stops being a thing.
Question: Without heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's, what will kill us? It cannot all be shark attacks and avalanches. What new horrible diseases will step up to be big killers in the future?
Which one? All of them? The mechanisms of neoplastic development and growth are protean. If his prediction is based on aspirations of finding a common pathway, I’m afraid it will be unrealized.
I share his enthusiasm for assisted drug development and so forth; but let’s be realistic. Besides, doesn’t his company have an upcoming IPO? I guess it’s a fine time for unbridled optimism then, isn’t it?
> I guess it’s a fine time for unbridled optimism then, isn’t it?
To be fair, they've kept up this fairy-tale optimism most of the way through
”It's literally too dangerous for us to release"
Stock market goes down
"Ai will cure cancer everyone!"
"One person (who doesn't know the future but has a financial incentive to promise golden age) promises golden age.
Other people (who also don't know the future but don't want to lose their jobs) predict that they won't lose their jobs.
Both sides can be utterly wrong, so we spend our time in vain here".