Erik Reinertsen

"AI IS GOING TO CURE CANCER." I've heard this defense, or prediction, from several AI builders and boosters. But I've been frustrated by the lack of specifics. So I asked Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks how useful AI is at discovering new drugs. His answer: Today's LLMs are "not particularly good" at the kind of biology necessary to develop therapies. This is not an AI skeptic talking. Lilly has a huge deal with Nvidia to build a biology-focused supercomputer. You don't do that deal if you think the tech is a scam. But as Ricks explains, ChatGPT, Claude, etc work so well because they're trained on the internet and other texts—a universe of human language. But there is no equivalent record of biology. There is no complete internet of human anatomy. And so while AI is promising at answering some diagnostic questions and doing radiology, it's not even close to great at doing the thing that it's boosters claim it will do. The AI discourse is still overpopulated with people living in a future that doesn't exist (AI is thiiiis close to curing cancer) and people living in a present that doesn't exist (AI doesn't have a business model, it's an empty parlor trick that can't "think," etc).