Because their core product is not a long-term sustainable business strategy. Local hardware and models will continue to improve to the point of not needing the hosted solutions. And if you do need a hosted solution, remember that the big cloud providers already offer these solutions, so signing up for OpenAI/Anthropic _and_ AWS/GCP/Azure is not a sound business decision compared to just signing up with 1 of them that offers your cloud infra + GenAI infra. (Which is why the long-term benefits for cloud companies will probably be for the likes of AWS and not the likes of OpenAI).
They'll continue to burn model for marginal model improvements in the next few years all the while having no moat _and_ having Open-Weight / Local models eat their lunch.
The only way for them to stay relevant as a company is to expand beyond simply providing the models.
I'm old enough to remember the arrival of RDBMS, once IBM primed the space with DB2.
There was a pitched battle over features like row-level locking as competitors like Sybase, Ingress and Oracle scrapped it out. New features arrived on a monthly cadence, with immense engineering effort behind them. The winners (Oracle mostly) won a great moat which led to them to where they are today.
The fact that so many AI companies can produce amazing coding tools so quickly shows there is no moat, supporting your theory.
If your core service is getting more expensive to provide and competitors are busy eating your margins, why let someone else taste your secret sauce and only get paid for the tokens, when you can keep the good stuff (bio capability) for yourself, and net both the profit and the fame?
I run into this all the time - we have such powerful functionality available to our users, and further we provide the elements that undergird all of it, so it’s totally possible for clients to take the services they buy from us and reconfigure them to make their own tools, better even than the ones we have built, purpose-built for their workflows…
And 9/10 clients will just click on the one thing they know and recognize and are familiar with and comfortable with… and then stop thinking about it.
It’s crazy how much of our job is not only building our product, but interrogating our clients over what they need, so we can demonstrate how our tools solve their problem. The users simply are not interested in figuring it out for themselves.
It's clear Dario believes that the solution to AI's PR problem is to cure cancer. Or invent other revolutionary medical treatments. They're going to heavily promote every step along the way no matter how small or far away from commercialization they are, like this one.
No doubt that curing cancer would help, but I think the timeline might be a little too long. Even RSI AGI will not be able to get new medical treatments to market instantly. Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.
Dario would like to ‘cure’ aging. He’s got some personal experience with bad illnesses, but aging isn’t that. I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.
> I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.
I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness.
Edit: And, you're saying you want to die. Is that more trustworthy than not wanting to die? I suppose if you are religious, you might believe you're going somewhere good when you die, in which case, you don't actually believe death exists, so we're having different conversations. I believe death exists and is permanent, and I'd like to not do that.
Why? Who in their right mind would have children in 2026? Everything is burning, gone to shit, and projected to get worse. Having children is insanely irresponsible.
Also the general public might find the implications of AGI so distasteful even if everything goes well that we might stall out or get the Butlerian Jihad before we can cure cancer. Artists and Software Engineers, now also Mathematicians, already have existential crises, but the public still thinks AI is fake. I can't imagine the backlash when the realize what's coming even in the good ending.
As they should because things like this get people thinking even if it something small. Once you get people thinking about things you tend to get solutions.
Yep, my prediction is that Anthropic is going to use Claude's reputation to "launder" known solutions to aging, cancer, and other things that society hasn't accepted quite yet. But maybe with the right marketing we'll try those things!
You can't say this. We have no idea. There is nothing about the law of physics that pushes cancer cure a long time away. A lot of people would have told you AI was decades away, yet here we are. We are still on track for possible strong take off.
Now on real world testing, you think the rule applies? I tell you it doesn't. Human life might be precious, but human life in practice is also not precious. We waste so much of it. In some countries regulations will stop/slow it, but there are plenty of places around the world that will turn a blind eye for a fistful of dollars. Countries will go to those locations if it means gaining an edge.
There are many things about the laws of physics that push a cancer cure a long time away! Biology is downstream of physics, and the biology of cancer is so vast that the very concept of a "cure for cancer" is almost nonsensical.
Cancer can be cured in a lot of cases, its just so damn expensive and the treatment is beyond torturous that some patients cannot handle it. Stem cells are amazing. But we need cheaper technology to replicate them into the cancer destroyers they need to be, as well as find ways to ease the pain of that internal battle.
Please tell me more about these “cures” you speak of. Because to my knowledge, yes we are good at getting patients into remission, we do not have “cures”
Coupled with the fact that treatment is often life altering in and of itself
We also have therapies based on monoclonal recombinant antibodies conjugated with chemotherapeutics. Simply put, we can produce antibodies that are specific for markers present in the surface of cancer cells, and we can attach drugs that can kill those cells. The antibody part is what makes this type of therapy very effective (you target only cancer cells, and not healthy cells) and also very expensive.
Semantics. Cancer is uncontrolled growth of cells. Treating it is killing/removing the cancer cells. Problem of course is you are never sure if you got all of them. If you got all of them you are “cured”. If you didn’t you are not cured in case the remaining cells manage to grow and spread again. We don’t talk about “cure” because of course it is impossible to verify if 100% is gone or not.
Burn (radiation). Cut. Poison (chemo). Your picks for cancer. IMHO Eat less. Remove all sugar and vitamins. Go a week without food. Give your body time to kill the weak cancer cells before they grow exponentially.
Its going to be an uphill battle. Every story about job losses, consequences to the community from building a datacenter (real or perceived), eminent domain case that blows up, plus all the slop on every platform. Not to mention a lot of normies think techbros are obnoxious, and that is who is hyping ai.
They'll need to show their goal is to help humanity and that all the other peoole arent acceptable collateral damage. Since those other people get to vote.
>> the solution to AI's PR problem is to cure cancer
I think its much simpler than that.
Anything actually useful for people would be a good solution.
Obviously image gen and code gen is not the case, as though it does increase productivity, it doesn't make anyone's life actually better. If it led to 4 day work week - sure. Otherwise it could easily be net negative.
> Even RSI will not be able to get new medical treatments to market instantly. Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.
I am already having a headache thinking of the whining from the biologist community (if any? I hope their reaction is not as extreme as that of mathematicians).
This shows why biology is so much harder a problem area for LLMs than math, finding RTs is tedious but pretty doable today, they had to scope the problem down a lot from something that would be the equivalent of Navier Stokes in biology. Glad they’re doing it though, even if it’s just marketing.
Very cool! However, the amazing absence of results makes me question whether they've got a Nature letter forthcoming or whether they know that another AI lab has a similar finding...
yes and no; you cant dump DNA in the context window and call it a day, in the blog post it was a common tool calling session. you do can have actual ml models for that, that the llm could use as a tool.
I don't think you quite understand the loops here.
At Google/OpenAI/Anthropic level you have clusters of LLM agents working with clusters of ML agents doing all kinds of tasks. A lot of this falls into proto-RSI where the LLM can improve the ML agents output based on analysis of said ML.
This isn't much different from how people work, you can't dump even part of DNA context in a human mind and get anything useful out. We has humans have to use and build tools to find answers because of scaling efficiencies of different computation types.
This is great, but I can't help but wonder if we're going to have another post next week with a lab complaining that they were about to publish this same finding, and they had Claude proofread their paper, and whoops how'd that get into Anthropic's training data?
I wonder how long it will take for the damage Alpöge and Buckmaster have done to the perception of these AI-driven scientific developments to fade.
Not saying that they were right or wrong, but that single moment sullied all AI-driven breakthroughs that came after it, and I don't think it was ever particularly relevant, at least not nearly to the degree that it was presented in the media. But I guess it ended up being a convenient outlet for AI anxiety in the end.
There are so many people involved on this yet we still say things like "Claude did", we need to start waking up and being more real about how we are still in "AI + Human" land.
What's wrong with saying "A team of researchers backed by Anthropic using Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats" or, ffs, mention the lead researcher in the headline?
Aren't there unlimited mechanisms like this? Isn't this why Doudna isn't a billionaire (you can patent something, but it's easy to create another one and patent it separately)?
I think the odds of a human accidentally creating a novel virus or bioweapon at the behest of a rouge AI are pretty small to be honest. That's a lot of manual labor to go "oops I didn't realize what this was!"
Not that I agree with the comment you're replying to - but I find this response funny, when just today there was a link on the front page about the US military bombing a school because of AI output
Biosafety is a very real concern but "lab" is a big bucket, a molecular genetics lab can't synthesize new viruses out of thin air if it's not a virology lab. Sequencers sequence etc. The lab has the equipment it has.
The singularity, as defined by Hinton (and others) as RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) may actually be beginning already, as OpenAI has announced an AI acting as a "research intern" (!).
Self improvement during training, and AI self training are already happening. Easily/quickly are seemingly a factor of how much power/hardware you want to use at once.
With the level of compute they have they aren't stuck with frozen models like you are.
I guess the improvement loop is tighter and they have more control over how discoveries can be used for marketing?
But, in my mind, it begins to feel like they are setting themselves up to be “everything” companies instead of focusing on their core product…
They'll continue to burn model for marginal model improvements in the next few years all the while having no moat _and_ having Open-Weight / Local models eat their lunch.
The only way for them to stay relevant as a company is to expand beyond simply providing the models.
There was a pitched battle over features like row-level locking as competitors like Sybase, Ingress and Oracle scrapped it out. New features arrived on a monthly cadence, with immense engineering effort behind them. The winners (Oracle mostly) won a great moat which led to them to where they are today.
The fact that so many AI companies can produce amazing coding tools so quickly shows there is no moat, supporting your theory.
I run into this all the time - we have such powerful functionality available to our users, and further we provide the elements that undergird all of it, so it’s totally possible for clients to take the services they buy from us and reconfigure them to make their own tools, better even than the ones we have built, purpose-built for their workflows…
And 9/10 clients will just click on the one thing they know and recognize and are familiar with and comfortable with… and then stop thinking about it.
It’s crazy how much of our job is not only building our product, but interrogating our clients over what they need, so we can demonstrate how our tools solve their problem. The users simply are not interested in figuring it out for themselves.
No doubt that curing cancer would help, but I think the timeline might be a little too long. Even RSI AGI will not be able to get new medical treatments to market instantly. Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.
I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness.
Edit: And, you're saying you want to die. Is that more trustworthy than not wanting to die? I suppose if you are religious, you might believe you're going somewhere good when you die, in which case, you don't actually believe death exists, so we're having different conversations. I believe death exists and is permanent, and I'd like to not do that.
what a weird bias
Why are you only allowed to live forever if you have kids?
Seems like someone seeking immortality should be willing to do for the elixir if they want it even a little bit...
How so?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329717
Now on real world testing, you think the rule applies? I tell you it doesn't. Human life might be precious, but human life in practice is also not precious. We waste so much of it. In some countries regulations will stop/slow it, but there are plenty of places around the world that will turn a blind eye for a fistful of dollars. Countries will go to those locations if it means gaining an edge.
https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2024...
https://jitc.bmj.com/content/8/2/e000848 (careful: Figure 1 can be very graphical, but it shows the huge positive impact of this therapy)
We also have therapies based on monoclonal recombinant antibodies conjugated with chemotherapeutics. Simply put, we can produce antibodies that are specific for markers present in the surface of cancer cells, and we can attach drugs that can kill those cells. The antibody part is what makes this type of therapy very effective (you target only cancer cells, and not healthy cells) and also very expensive.
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t...
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/immunoth...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cell
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/10/cancer-treat...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It’s the top rated comment in the thread. Somebody tried to do something good, this is the response.
This pisses me off severely.
He isn’t wrong. But selling potential cures for cancer won’t cut it.
They'll need to show their goal is to help humanity and that all the other peoole arent acceptable collateral damage. Since those other people get to vote.
I think its much simpler than that. Anything actually useful for people would be a good solution.
Obviously image gen and code gen is not the case, as though it does increase productivity, it doesn't make anyone's life actually better. If it led to 4 day work week - sure. Otherwise it could easily be net negative.
Not if it's a virus
Is it unavoidable, though?
Generally speaking, hiring an army of influencers to shill for you results in bad PR, and comments like this one.
At Google/OpenAI/Anthropic level you have clusters of LLM agents working with clusters of ML agents doing all kinds of tasks. A lot of this falls into proto-RSI where the LLM can improve the ML agents output based on analysis of said ML.
This isn't much different from how people work, you can't dump even part of DNA context in a human mind and get anything useful out. We has humans have to use and build tools to find answers because of scaling efficiencies of different computation types.
Not saying that they were right or wrong, but that single moment sullied all AI-driven breakthroughs that came after it, and I don't think it was ever particularly relevant, at least not nearly to the degree that it was presented in the media. But I guess it ended up being a convenient outlet for AI anxiety in the end.
The people that say "It's just a next word predictor" might as well be saying "Well, it's just a long rage nuclear missile".
There are so many people involved on this yet we still say things like "Claude did", we need to start waking up and being more real about how we are still in "AI + Human" land.
What's wrong with saying "A team of researchers backed by Anthropic using Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats" or, ffs, mention the lead researcher in the headline?
> All of the lab work is performed by human scientists.
With the level of compute they have they aren't stuck with frozen models like you are.