Thread

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. gavinray · 1790195247 · focus · HN ↗
  Did anyone read the blogpost? They did publish a pre-print:
  > Our work to understand the primary function of ARTs is ongoing. However, we think it is important to share such findings early, both to demonstrate Claude’s capabilities and to give the broader community insight into what we’re working on. We have released a pre-print (here) that discusses this in more detail.
  <a href="https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/22573675ada52a8ca8a97a1a4b4326b2f208a071.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/22573675ada52a8ca8a97a1a4b4326...
  1. hn_throwaway_99 · 1790195339 · focus · HN ↗
    Just going to post this. And I think it's safe to say that no, they didn't read it.
  2. beAbU · 1790195720 · focus · HN ↗
    What's with all this pre-print business. It became very prevalent during covid, where it felt like every week some new pre-print was published that discusses some new aspect of the virus. These papers would then be used in arguments and put forward as proof of whatever claim the arguer was making.
    Every man and his dog can publish a pre-print and in my opinion it's academically worthless.
    howunfortunate · 1790196102 · focus · HN ↗
    Journal articles are usually behind a paywall. Preprints are a fully open workaround allowed by most journals.
    > Every man and his dog can publish a pre-print and in my opinion it's academically worthless.
    Sure but if you look at the authors names and see they have 50 other published papers, you can get a rough idea that it's probably equivalently good to their other work.
    Until you've done it yourself, it's hard to grok just how bad the peer review process is. It's like...5% better than nothing.
    Honestly you could argue peer review is worse than nothing, as it also filters out actually quality work that violates some dogma of the field.
    bpodgursky · 1790198222 · focus · HN ↗
    The review time on top journals is multiple years now (your paper will go through many review loops each of which takes months). It's just totally unworkable for active research, whether you're a student or a corporation.
    ACCount39 · 1790198631 · focus · HN ↗
    Preprints are just a way to sacrifice rigor for accessibility and velocity. You can throw out "here, this is what I'm working on, here are the quick and dirty findings" really fast and with little friction.
    This does skip the academic "checks and balances" like journal selection and peer review - but it can also help anyone else who's working on the adjacent topics.
    If a field is moving fast, and you think there can be some value in your work for others in the near term? Preprint. If your work is too incomplete or too minor to warrant trying to polish and publish it, but you don't want to table it? Preprint. Too deep in corporate structures to care about academic "street cred", and want your work to be accessible? Preprint. Have an exciting early finding that you want to push out there, and are willing to take the rep risks of being wrong about it? Preprint.
    There's a reason why preprints came to be the lifeblood of ML.
    VBprogrammer · 1790199591 · focus · HN ↗
    Academia isn't my thing but I also wonder if there isn't an aspect of putting a stake in the ground? So that if someone beats you to publishing you at least have some record of being on that track.
    gmueckl · 1790201421 · focus · HN ↗
    That is definitely a big motivator for publishing preprints. Journal submissions can take up to a year. Comference submissions take months. If the field is moving fast, claiming a finding early can become an important career move.
    In older days, academics would just share notes on their work and word wouldn't usually spread widely before publication.
    Preprints may be the better model. But public visibility means that non-experts now get to see the good and the bad research equally, but they won't have the domain knowledge and skill to distinguish one from the other with confidence.
    sandeepkd · 1790198931 · focus · HN ↗
    I have a similar to pagerank method I use to evaluate such papers. I look for the references to see how many authors are using their own references (past work), the idea being that people do not jump too far, they make incremental progress.
    For the pre-print I could only find only one author who has a single referenced article.
    dekhn · 1790217693 · focus · HN ↗
    The pre-print authors all have long publication histories.
    Pagerank was inspired by academic citation networks; it just turned it in a recursive matrix problem (of which there was some prior literature).
    sandeepkd · 1790223941 · focus · HN ↗
    > references to see how many authors are using their own references (past work), the idea being that people do not jump too far, they make incremental progress
    The authors are not using their own prior work in the paper, thats the point I was trying to make. I have worked in biotech lab for couple years and its one of the criteria's people use to consider some ones work useful and worth the time.
    dekhn · 1790267520 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you fundamentally misunderstand both the results published here, and how scientists operating at the highest level of academic research operate. None of these authors has to worry about citing previous work to get the attention of biotech labs.
  3. bonsai_spool · 1790196098 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't recall that being there when I first read their post a few hours ago... No way to confirm, sadly, as they've posted it to their own domain
    gchamonlive · 1790197424 · focus · HN ↗
    Earliest snapshot is from 3 hours ago, more or less, it already shows the pre-print: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260923180804/https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme-system" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260923180804/https://www.anthr...
    letmevoteplease · 1790197605 · focus · HN ↗
    archive.is has a snapshot from 18:47, showing the link was indeed there a few hours ago. <a href="https://archive.is/XM0Nw" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/XM0Nw
    enraged_camel · 1790198419 · focus · HN ↗
    The link was there from the start. Perhaps you were just looking for something to criticize. And now you've moved the goalposts to "they've posted it to their own domain."
  4. epihelix · 1790200653 · focus · HN ↗
    I just looked at it. I really hope they're not thinking of sending that to an actual bioinformatics, computational biology or molecular biology journal! So embarrassing...
    (I love how Anthropic boast about building a lab, but don't seem to realise that you have to test your hypothesis in the lab! Right now, all their "spectacular" assertions are untested and unproven.)
    I realise that this will only improve from here, but gods Anthropic has no idea about the biological sciences right now.
    dekhn · 1790203306 · focus · HN ↗
    Um. Take a look at the authors. Every single one of them is an expert in this field. They did test this in a lab.
    If you want to complain about things like this, it really helps to be specific. Given the author list, it's unlikely they made any truly spectacular errors (and also possible the system they studied is not interesting).
    irregularbowels · 1790204355 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    qwerpy · 1790206545 · focus · HN ↗
    This comment chain is depressing. People who hallucinated things they really wanted to be true. Guess it’s not a uniquely AI problem.
    dekhn · 1790217748 · focus · HN ↗
    Can you elaborate on what you're thinking? I don't see any support for this being a hallucaination; from what I can see, it's a pretty typical "early biological discovery".
    qwerpy · 1790218935 · focus · HN ↗
    I was poking fun at evolarjun and epihelix for "hallucinating" that this was just a marketing whitepaper (they did publish a pre-print) and that the preprint was "so embarrassing" (you said that the authors are actually experts). It kind of seemed like they had some opinion about AI and this paper, and wishfully concluded things that were not true to support their opinion.

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