I read frequently to my two-year-old son. It's a fun challenge for me, as I attempt to give every character a different voice and keep it consistent, to emulate the professionals who narrate the audiobooks that I listen to. Currently, he is enjoying Archie comics. I hope the effort I'm putting into it now will help secure his attraction to the medium once he's reading independently.

I love video games as much as I do novels. My parents restricted them for me severely (along with all other screen time) as a child, though, so the amount of time I spent on them was much smaller than the amount I spent reading novels. I thank my folks for that now. I'm not going to be as strict as they were with my son, but I hope I can find a happy medium. He's already very attracted to television, but we try to keep that to short, occasional sessions.

This is a massive exaggeration. The advancement in the automation of computer code writing has been impressive and is obviously, at least in the short term, changing the software engineering industry substantially. Most other fields have not been affected to nearly the same degree. Certainly not biology, physics, finance, and law (I don't know enough about the math and translation fields to speak to those).

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"3. Accelerating AI’s positive impact..."

This whole section is the type of thing that often comes out of the mouths of Silicon Valley tech executives without a pharma background. It indicates a thorough lack of understanding of the realities of pharmaceutical research. What he is describing here is removing many of the solid, evidentiary rules that are in place to make sure that the drugs reaching the market actually work and replacing them with proxy predictions. Look, my least favourite part of the job is the animal testing, and I would be hugely grateful if that could be eliminated from the drug discovery pipeline. People have been trying to do that for a long time. But it's extremely difficult. Biology is very, very complicated. Our understanding of how processes in organisms work are vague and approximative. This is not computer code. Even if Anthropic somehow got all of Big Pharma to hand them their proprietary data, it would only scratch the surface of the understanding that is needed to solve these kind of problems. Due to these realities, the program Amodei is describing here would, effectively, open a floodgate of drugs on the market that don't actually do what they are supposed to and are more likely to have unidentified toxicity.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFENS#

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446305

Points: 11

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