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Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

780 points · 805 comments · raahelb

evolarjun · 1790192734 · focus · HN ↗
It is odd (or maybe not) that they decided to publish a marketing whitepaper rather than a more traditional journal submission + preprint. The work does appear to be sufficient for a publication, though there's a good chance a reviewer will rip into them for some of the assertions they make, but given the topic I'm sure the paper will be accepted regardless.
The market for entry-level programmers has already declined, but at least they were somewhat in demand and made reasonable salaries. Now what happens to post-docs who already make almost nothing and often get treated like crap?
1. stets · 1790193202 · focus · HN ↗
  Medical advances are more important than post docs
  1. papyrus9244 · 1790193601 · focus · HN ↗
    Absolutely. But without post docs, it won't be long before we are unable to understand what the LLMs are suggesting.
    plutomeetsyou · 1790193831 · focus · HN ↗
    once everyone lives to 200 yo there will be no need for post-docs - afterward we can just upload PI's brain to some AI.
    6LLvveMx2koXfwn · 1790194718 · focus · HN ↗
    I wonder who's going to pay for that extra 120 years of living we're gonna be doing?
    boinkboink78912 · 1790195300 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    emkoemko · 1790197184 · focus · HN ↗
    Musk said we will all be rich so we will?
    ben_w · 1790200450 · focus · HN ↗
    I have no idea what prompts questions like these.
    We got to 80 without inventing money. Living that long back then was hard work every day.
    Then the industrial revolution happened, and we got state pensions at one end of life and extended childhood a few years past adolescence on the other. We currently pay for this… by taxes funding both education and a pension.
    Absent the radical transformations of an AI driven economy, we live 200 years in exactly the same way.
    With those transformations, all bets are off unless they violate the laws of physics.
    AngryData · 1790209370 · focus · HN ↗
    But the majority of people in the world are still working just as hard now as before the industrial revolution? Most of the labor rights activists of the 19th and 20th century spent their time advocating for working hours closer to their pre-industrial grandparents. Industrialization increased working hours with the promise that eventually everyone will have to work less hours once the equipment was built. And yet many generations later countries are talking about increasing retirement age, reducing worker rights, and wage theft is more prevalent than all other forms of theft combined.
    What is AI going to do that industrialization and automation hasn't already made the same promises for?
    solenoid0937 · 1790217709 · focus · HN ↗
    This is a horribly wrong understanding of history. If you think life today is in any way comparable to the Industrial Revolution, you need to pick up a history book because your history classes failed you.
    AngryData · 1790269982 · focus · HN ↗
    If you think malnourished subsidence farmers could work non-stop before industrialization then you need to think about that a bit more and aread a bit more early and pre-industrial works.
    ben_w · 1790239946 · focus · HN ↗
    Before the industrial revolution, you started working as soon as you could assist with anything (cooking meant firewood, washing clothes was by hand, etc.); you stopped working when you were too feeble, and only if you were lucky (or from another perspective, very unlucky) a lord's almshouse might look after you.
    Life back then was a never-ending quest to make more calories, and you had to consume about 90% of what you made just to not starve. As total production was lower (and because "preservative" meant cats, alcohol, salt, and grain silos on mushroom-shaped pillars so rats couldn't get in, not industrial refrigeration and sodium benzoate etc.), this meant very different work schedule compare to today; but people were working at the limits of what biology would support, even if hours were fewer (no affordable artificial light to work at night) and "holy days" more plentiful… but on that front, most pop reporting on that seems to forget that today we have two-day weekends, while medieval European communities often only rested on Sunday (and even Sunday-is-rest-day was relaxed somewhat to avoid crop spoilage).
    The modern equivalent would be if everyone's job was to hit the gym for 10 hours a day in summer and 4 a day in winter, and still sometimes had mandatory overtime.
    What we actually have in developed nations today, is no significant labour before 18 or over 68, only about 70% the people of working age* are in work at any given time, and the "work" is far less intensive. Less than half of us are employed today to support the whole population. I say "are employed" rather than "work" because childcare and domestic work is still work, but this too is much easier than pre-industrial life.
    * "working age" means different things in different surveys: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_employment_rate" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_employmen...
    AngryData · 1790270203 · focus · HN ↗
    A malnourished subsidence farmer could work non-stop at the same pace as modern workers then I got a bridge to sell you. 19th century worker's advocating for worker rights were literally calling for working standards closer to their subsidence grandparents.
    ben_w · 1790275204 · focus · HN ↗
    > A malnourished subsidence farmer could work non-stop at the same pace as modern workers then I got a bridge to sell you.
    Way to misread what I wrote.
    A subsidence farmer necessarily spends their lives doing as much work as they can eat food, because the energy to do the work is that food.
    > 19th century worker's advocating for worker rights were literally calling for working standards closer to their subsidence grandparents.
    And? Those workers got those rights, past tense. The fact they got them is a big part of why less than half of the living population in OECD nations needs to work today: their efforts are why it is taxes paying for schools and pensions, not the largesse of lords limited to almshouses.
    AngryData · 1790287214 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah harvest season has longer hours, I grew up on a farm. But you aren't putting in anything like that amount of work most of the year. You don't work the same fields all year long. You got plenty of other things to do but not a full modern work schedule.
    Heating can be done in a few weeks even with handsaws and an axe. A chainsaw makes it faster.
    If 12th century peasants had to work anything like a modern work schedule, how would people a 1000 years or more before then survive at all with less technology, tools, and knowledge? How would clothing exist at all without a loom? How did ancient people have any time for discovery and innovation at all if their lives were nearly so grueling.
    Those workers rights activists didn't get all that they asked for. And why has it not gotten even better with another 100 years of productivity increases after that?
    To me your explainations seem like repeates of what robber barons claimed. The luddites didn't form because people thought industrialisation was allowing them to work less than those before them.
    wavewrangler · 1790200762 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    mikestorrent · 1790193957 · focus · HN ↗
    I can't understand what the post-docs are suggesting.
    drusepth · 1790194128 · focus · HN ↗
    True, but it's also not your job to understand what post-docs are suggesting (hopefully), unlike post-docs who kind of need to understand what LLMs are suggesting.
    mlinsey · 1790196756 · focus · HN ↗
    Not to get back into the AI safety debate from last week, but I really, really want a team of human experts to understand what the AI is suggesting before we administer new medical treatments or even just synthesize new lifeforms in the lab.
    fidotron · 1790199267 · focus · HN ↗
    At this point it should be clear that Anthropic are determined to create the doomsday scenario as the most idiotic "I told you so" gotcha in history.
    asdff · 1790197322 · focus · HN ↗
    If you can't, then you aren't in the field, and it doesn't matter if you could or not.
    ai-x · 1790194928 · focus · HN ↗
    There will always be a %age of humans who will be curious how the universe works including LLMs. Delusional to think those humans are only incentivized by degrees, or money.
    Humans were curious and started the intelligence / learning explosion much much before money and degrees were invented.
    papyrus9244 · 1790195678 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure. But unless they are born into a very wealthy family, or decide to pass up on having a family and other hobbies, they won't be able to satisfy that curiosity beyond a very basic level.
    matthewdgreen · 1790195781 · focus · HN ↗
    For most of history we died of easily preventable diseases because we lacked the scientific institutions to learn how to prevent them. The fact that a percentage of the population wanted to know more is why we live so well today, but it didn’t stop many of those people from dying awfully. It wouldn’t take a lot to go back there, or at least to a civilization that would go back there the second the AIs go down.
    sterlind · 1790198534 · focus · HN ↗
    many drugs were discovered, evaluated and approved without understanding at all how they worked.
    iirc back in the day chemists synthesized a whole bunch of random compounds, observed their effects (in mice etc., or even the chemists tasting them!) then did clinical trials to measure safety and efficacy.
    high-throughput screening of chemical libraries on in vitro assays is the modern version of this. "rational" drug design, which uses understanding of mechanisms to design chemical structures for a specific purpose, largely failed back in the '80s.
    suddenlybananas · 1790200870 · focus · HN ↗
    Well I guess who gives a shit about knowledge
    mlazos · 1790201586 · focus · HN ↗
    Ive been thinking about this a a lot, like now if LLMs can just try a bunch of things, you can just try them all now. Are there some applications where we can just brute force and test at scale and no longer need to understand? Where understanding is now in essence that it “works” and passes our acceptance tests.
    suddenlybananas · 1790201689 · focus · HN ↗
    I give a shit about knowledge! I think it's good entirely for its own sake.
    orangecat · 1790202281 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree! I'm also not going to turn down an Alzheimer's vaccine that's been demonstrated to be safe and effective even if we don't know exactly how it works. (And if you think that's a contrived fantasy, check out the shingles vaccine).
    atrus · 1790202965 · focus · HN ↗
    There's been a decent amount of drugs that have been made via a brute force method, but it's a pretty physical process, usually pipetting a few hundred thousand compounds and samples. There's also a lot of drugs where we don't fully understand how they work.
    dekhn · 1790203549 · focus · HN ↗
    The way I ask it in public situations with scientists is this: If you had an AI that could output cures for diseases (IE, drugs that pass phase III clinical trial, get approved by the FDA, and are highly effective), but it couldn't explain how it worked, would you use it?
    Opinions are mixed. Some folks will say that it's morally imperative to cure people even if we don't understand the specific or general principles. Other folks will insist that it's a terrible idea to hand over the comprehension of medical treatments to LLMs, because in the long term it will leave us helpless and dependent.
    pona-a · 1790258259 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]

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