Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • This is very, very weak.

    Clinical science is inundated with well-reasoned "potential leads". Ideas for targets, and even designing drugs to interact with those targets in the desired way, is not the bottleneck. Hasn't been for decades. The bottleneck is in clinical development i.e. human trials.

    There are many many AI drug discovery companies out there, many of them very well funded, and ALL of them with no shortage of "potential leads".

    These companies usually start out with the idea that their potential leads are better than the alternatives (generally because they cast a much bigger net/ considered more screening criteria than a human could, thanks to AI) and that big pharma will pay them license fees.

    And yet, all of those companies, pretty much without exception, have turned into drug development companies themselves. They are forced to develop their own "potential leads" into actual approved drugs. And they are subject to the same timelines, same costs and - so far - the same probabilities of success as any other drug developer.

    PerturbAI & OpenAI's "potential leads" might be better or worse than the next AI company. I would guess worse, given there is zero proprietary data involved and no clarity about why the underlying models are going to generate insightful findings. Either way, not useful.

    by mdevere
  • This is… not bad, but not ground breaking. I expect there will be something more in the coming years but nothing that will change the fundamental about disease and illness. For AI to make “orders-of-magnitude” more progress into the biology of diseases, fully automated labs are the next thing, though I would rather not have one of those here on Earth… maybe we should put a couple billion on building biolabs on the Moon…
    by dsign
  • I hope OpenAI will prove its usefulness in stealing joy from mathematicians, engineers, and biologists this time. It feels like there's a chance of warmer feedback this time from everyone out there keeping an eye on what they do.

    Personally I would forgive all of the joy being stolen by AI if they discover something fundamental and outstanding that would help all of us.

    by RomanPushkin
  • The problem was never generating leads. The bottleneck is validated results. It’s performing clinical trials proving efficacy. And this is where I think AI will have the biggest impact—-helping scientist, navigate study complexity and regulatory burden
    by jostmey
  • This is one of the laziest and nonsensical press releases I have ever seen attached to a scientific paper. Everything in the press release is either misrepresenting what is in the linked paper or is completely obvious and uninteresting.

    Evidently if you fan-out data analysis work across 1946 agents instead of just one, the analysis is faster and more thorough than if you instructed a single agent to go through all of the 1946 genes sequentially. And that, in turn, is faster than if you did it yourself. Like, duh.

    The linked paper is not exactly transformative, but the impression it leaves is quite a bit better than the nonsense press release.

    by anthuswilliams
  • Ai labs look to be desperate to try and stave off the cooling hype that looks to be snowballing in the industry right now. These next few months are going to be crucial to their potential survival and future.

    Its not surprising to me that this press release looks half-baked.

    by SimianSci
  • Notice how it goes from "we proved Fields-medal level stuff" to "promising leads" when we go to the world of biology. Still awesome, but speaks to the limitations of pure thinking in a more applied subject. No automatic cancer cures today.
    by shearerp
  • I am surprised they end on a gene mutation already known to be involved in a rare disease and a vague hypothesis about the mechanism. Among the many things DCTN1 does... it also directs autophagosomes toward lysosomes for waste degradation. Hm, disruptions in waste degradation.. build up of unwanted proteins and waste in cells... yeah that seems like it would cause neurodegeneration as well! Point being, there are dozens of things, maybe hundreds. Is cholesterol particularly compelling here? Not really. PhD students come up with similar hypotheses every hour. Hypotheses are cheap. I'm sure it can and will do better, but for now... I feel they might be underprepared for curing all disease in 10 years.
    by kidel001

Explore Birbla archives