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- Hacker News
- I don't understand how an LLM is able to reason about those things
LLM use language, but it can't "think" about biochemistry
I saw that LLM have reasoning capabilities, which is different from machine learning, but I don't understand how it works.
by jokoon - Saying that "Claude found" this is very creepy.
Not once in the article did they mention the humans involved in this.
If you scroll to the bottom, click on the small link in the second last paragraph you'll find a technical report that acknowledges the humans involved:
https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/22573675ada52a8ca8a97a1a4b4326...
- Whatever happened to no bio research? It's absurd that these companies are even remotely allowed to work in this domain without profuse oversight and independent monitoring.
Also, does Claude produce the references and original authors of the knowledge and research that provided for this "discovery" so they can get credited? I didn't think so.
by isodev - >While this underlying RT, found in a jumbo phage, had been identified in previous studies, Claude appears to be the first to notice the system’s defining features—an associated array of non-coding DNA sequences and an additional accessory protein of unknown function.
So they investigated an already known thing. Not exactly "discovering a new system"... Anyone with money to throw at this already-known thing would have gotten those results I assume.
- Considering what happened on the Navier–Stokes event of OpenAI recently, I keep wondering how much of these discoveries are actually
a.) novel isolated achievements of an AI, or
b.) the result of continuous focused in-house training with data involuntarily contributed by thousands of researchers using the LLM, aiming to make a press-release to boost the reputation of the AI in question...
It's quite a novel situation, where thousands of people use a tool from the same supplier to solve a problem, for the supplier to silently join the race, consolidate all work and jump in at the last minute to claim that HE solved the problem.
Like e.g. Nike removing the runner from their shoes at last minute to claim that the race was won by the shoe alone...
by rickdeckard - Anthropic: You absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, use Claude for bio-engineering. It could literally end humanity.
Also Anthropic: Claude discovers a new way to edit your genome!
by danpalmer - > While combing through the raw DNA sequence near the RT, the agent exclaimed: “[The DNA next to the RT] is spectacular: I can see by eye a tandem repeat array … that's a CRISPR-like … repeat array?!”
I love that with AI discoveries, we can relive the discoveries from agent transcripts like this.
I'm sort of imagining future histories involving notable AI events peppered with direct quotes like these.
- Current evolved Cas9 (CRISPR) variants are highly efficient and relatively unconstrained in terms of their human genome targeting coverage. Smaller nucleases and higher targeting specificity would be useful. But therapeutic use is mostly limited by delivery.
This seems revolve around a known retron-like reverse transcriptase. A sober framing would be something like: Claude identified a previously undescribed genomic arrangement around a known reverse transcriptase. Not all that sexy.
For now, this is mostly a story about how AI can be used to parse existing data to discover new biology (which is fantastic!).