Matt Shumer on the hopeful AI scenario: millions of expert AIs attacking one disease at a time
mattshumer_ · x · 2026-09-24
Following last week's piece on how AI could kill us, HyperWrite founder Matt Shumer sketches the optimistic counterfactual:
- What the good future feels like: a lump is found, scans are read that same afternoon, and the doctor discusses a treatment made for exactly this — as routine as a broken arm.
- How AI gets us there: millions of AIs, each as good as the field's best expert, working one disease around the clock — proposing tens of thousands of untried ideas, cross-checking each other's work, and dropping dead ends fast. It doesn't exist yet, but early signs are here.
- Why it's plausible: in 2020 frontier LLMs flubbed basic arithmetic; this year an AI solved a math problem that stumped leading mathematicians for eighty years, with a top mathematician saying he'd recommend acceptance at a leading journal; OpenAI also recently claimed a proof for another famous fluid-dynamics problem.
The post includes a promo for three free months of Granola.
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