A medicine insider: AI's math wins don't mean biology is next — data is the hard bottleneck
red5 · reddit · 2026-09-11
A medicine professional pushes back on the 'AI solved math, biology is next' narrative, calling it magical thinking.
- Biology's bottleneck is data, not reasoning: we don't even fully understand a single cell, and collecting experimental data (growing cells, measuring, verifying) has hard physical limits.
- He criticizes Dario Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace for acknowledging that experiments and clinical trials are limited by physical-world speed, yet still predicting 50–100 years of biology progress compressed into 5–10.
- Clinical trials take years and cost fortunes, and often fail even with good mechanistic knowledge (citing Novartis' pelacarsen Phase III miss). Genetic variation, cell specialization, and organ interactions explode the problem space.
- COVID vaccines show even parallel trials and fast regulation required global coordination, billions in funding, and a weeks-measurable outcome — impossible to replicate for Alzheimer's or cancer interventions measured over years.
- Conclusion: too many in AI assume breakthroughs in one field translate to others; hope is fine, but we need clear eyes.
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