What I've found is that AIs are good at writing zinc problems.For example, the game peg solitaire- no matter how much I played I could never get to less then 2 pegs remaining. Gemini writes a zinc program which solves it (final peg in center) and then I tested the moves. Same with rubik's cube. Then I read the zinc program and it makes perfect sense!

In short, if you solve a monogenic disease you help maybe 20-30 million worldwide (and then you have to solve other ones), if you solve CVD,type 2 diabets, hypertension- each of those is 500+M people. So in general, we would expect to have more impact with polygenic, although they tend to be far harder to treat because of the complexity.

I'm just responding to:

"""Genetic tests for cancer are a different kind of genetic test. They test the tumor itself for mutations that are present only in the tumor, not in the rest of the body."""

Strictly speaking, BRCA is a genetic test for cancer (even if it's only a "risk factor"), and it's done on the regular genome, not on the cancer.

(None of this is important or really relevant)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaChip#Internal_dispute_at_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaChip#External_attempts_to... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaChip#Research_integrity_c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaChip#Author_responses

Google fired the internal employee who blew the whistle on this, and while Jeff Dean repeatedly defended the project, after reading all the complaints, I came to the conclusion that (like many other Google papers) the results were selectively reported in a way that made the paper sound better than it was.

One bad side effect of coming in with your own self-diagnosis is sometimes they will index on that and stop considering other possibilities they would have suggested if you hadn't primed them with a diagnosis.

It took me decades (and a ton of advice from my wife) to understand how medical systems work and to get the results I want. Having a good relationship with your PCP is invaluable.

Very few diseases are caused by individual mutations like that (typically only monogenic Mendelian). Individual mutations typically cause an increased propensity, or severity, rather than being the sole or root cause of a disease.

(fuck cancer)

If they succeeded, you can bet everybody else will be duplicating their results within 2-3 years.

The folks who actually go work in the field, understand the structural problems, the costs/benefits, and the long slog to bring successful treatments to patients are skeptical. But we're still more than happy to be proved wrong- if Anthropic (more than OpenAI) is working on life sciences and drops some amazing information that transforms cancer care with massive positive results, we all win.

[ if I gave you a picture of something on my skin could you diagnose it as a melanoma ]

No, I cannot diagnose skin conditions or identify melanoma from a photograph.

AI-based image analysis cannot replace a professional medical evaluation. Skin conditions—especially potentially serious ones like melanoma—require a physical examination, and often a dermatoscope or biopsy, by a qualified healthcare professional such as a dermatologist.

Even before that, I had this insane software OpenGL called MetroX which was a full replacement for XFree86 that had native OpenGL support, allowing me to port a molecular graphics package (MidasPlus) to Linux (at the time, the authors used expensive SGIs and Alpha workstations). Later, Mesa replaced MetroX and was fast enough to do routine modelling for smaller systems, and eventually, with nvida T&L we could finally do decent large scale modelling (although the program used lines, which typically were not well-accelerated on the lower end cards that I could afford). At that point, the group I worked with looked at my machine (a linux box with a consumer grade GPU) and looked at their SGIs (including the abysmal SGI Visual Workstation running NT) and Alphas and saw the writing on the wall and eventually switched to Linux as their primary platform.

It really was a perfect example of "first they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" for me.