[greygoo222]

The LLM did not design the drug. The LLM summarized some papers on how to design similar drugs, and then a dozen specialized tools were used in an established pipeline to design the drug. You people need to read the article and read the background before writing nonsense based on your assumptions.

Here's a previous comment of mine talking about personalized mRNA vaccines with useful citations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210284

[littlestymaar]

Funny how you keep skipping the unbelievable part of the story out of your replies: why would he spend 3 month hand typing a document that an LLM can definitely make at least 80% of it in one shot?

[greygoo222]

Have you ever tried writing a long, complicated document with an LLM? The last 20% takes 99% of the work.

[notahacker]

True, and even more true in the case that you barely understand what you're doing. That's a feature rather than a bug of this sort of paperwork; the person who's simply pestered ChatGPT until it says "great idea" won't cross that threshold at all, whereas this guy [and the bioinformatics processing chain and experts in the loop he found] crossed it in his spare time. If it was just the "two hours a night typing" as quoted in the article, LLMs can do it in no time.

"ChatGPT better at finding expert advice than filling in compliance forms" and even "getting workable results from latest generation Open Source bioinformatics tools possible for smart laymen with minimal background reading; learning enough to prove they aren't dangerous only takes marginally longer" doesn't sound nearly as bad as "layman asks ChatGPT to cure his dog's cancer, only hard bit is writing enough words to convince gatekeepers" as rendered by news coverage of this (and not really elaborated on more by the TFA). A rendering which really should trigger people's bullshit filters.

Other fields crossed the computers can find potential solutions easily a lot earlier (any idiot can put dimensions into pretty dumb civil engineering tools and get answers that are probably correct; don't as me how I know!) and actually have higher barriers (no, even if you actually learn the relevant physics as well you will still need to pass some elements of your home design via someone with the right professional liability insurance linked to their experience and formal qualifications)

[littlestymaar]

> The last 20% takes 99% of the work.

Of course it does, since the first 80% take literal minutes! But if you compare to doing it entirely manually, it's still x5 more efficient.

Why would you do it all by hand (spending 200hours in the process…) when you're an “AI entrepreneur”…

In fairness, it pains me to see people as gullible as you are just because you like the idea of the story being true.

[greygoo222]

You don't understand how the technology in question works, and you're just making shit up because you don't want to admit to being wrong.

What are you alleging here anyways? That all the scientists quoted and photographed in the article discussing their part in making the vaccine are in on the game? That the Australian made the story up wholesale? Come on.

[littlestymaar]

> You don't understand how the technology in question work

See my comment history. I do know very well how language models work. Thank you.

What I don't know is why you're claiming you disagree with the story reported here being bullshit (the story being almost literally “ChatGPT did the heavy lifting and the only reason we can't have nice thing is because red tape is blocking humanity”: “he used AI to teach himself about how a personalized vaccine could work, designed much of the process himself. […] The red tape was actually harder than the vaccine creation”), when you know very well it's bullshit because your comments describe what has most likely happened (ChatGPT did nothing much besides telling what could work and pointing towards which scientists to seek help from).

Again, literally no one question the fact that mRNA-based medicine has incredible potential, the bullshit here is not about the medicine: it's about red tape being the only bottleneck in a fantasyland where AI solves all the hard challenges.