Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 105 posts

Re: AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

#91

Post by abirch »

colingauvin wrote: post #69
plaidfuji wrote: post #54

> “…the focus of AI in drug discovery must shift from doing what can be done - such as modelling data that is readily available, but that is unlikely to move the needle - to doing what should be done, even if this requires, for example, substantial data generation…” It’s a worthy goal, but I think that many involved in this work might be thinking, even unconsciously, “You first”. This is the problem with AI for all o…

The real value right now is in figuring out how to generate robust data cheaply and quickly. I'd wager that the effect of a good model on marginal data is small, but the effect of a marginal model on great data is probably quite large.

I completely agree with you. Data quality is the most important. One thing that's sad is how much academic data that's not reproducible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Re: AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

#92

Post by RA_Fisher »

plaidfuji wrote: post #54

> “…the focus of AI in drug discovery must shift from doing what can be done - such as modelling data that is readily available, but that is unlikely to move the needle - to doing what should be done, even if this requires, for example, substantial data generation…” It’s a worthy goal, but I think that many involved in this work might be thinking, even unconsciously, “You first”. This is the problem with AI for all o…

Yes indeed, I call it the revenge of statistics! Pseudoreplication rears its ugly head once again. Nonparametrics are certainly useful, but once you know things about the DGP, it’s often possible to do something “traditional” that’s better. Probabilistic programming, for life!

Re: AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

#93

Post by zer00eyz »

colingauvin wrote: post #31

I'm a structural biologist at a mid-sized biotech. I use AI tools daily. They make accomplishing the same things I was able to accomplish before quite a lot faster and easier. They don't help me magically accomplish new things that I couldn't previously. For example, it helps me install academic software, debug things. It helps me take a large dataset and write scripts to ask questions. It helps me go through experim…

> For example, it helps... debug things... and write scripts to ask questions.

Im guessing this isnt code that needs to "scale", that needs to "be elegant", that you arent focused on maintainability for the next decade. That its built for purpose and left behind.

Its all the code that for a programer would normally be in this matrix https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth your time) -

Re: AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

#95

Post by xtracto »

bharatsuthar wrote: post #75
techpression wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This made me laugh, more than expected, but I did visit LinkedIn just before so that could explain it. Thanks!

Yeah it's [x was never the hard part] all the way down. It's a very human thing and I bet we'd keep saying that even after we've solved the hardest mysteries including consciousness, the origin of life or the true nature of reality.

Somehow reminded me of:

THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA TO ANSWER THE QUESTION.

Re: AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

#96

Post by colingauvin »

zer00eyz wrote: post #93
colingauvin wrote: post #31

I'm a structural biologist at a mid-sized biotech. I use AI tools daily. They make accomplishing the same things I was able to accomplish before quite a lot faster and easier. They don't help me magically accomplish new things that I couldn't previously. For example, it helps me install academic software, debug things. It helps me take a large dataset and write scripts to ask questions. It helps me go through experim…

> For example, it helps... debug things... and write scripts to ask questions. Im guessing this isnt code that needs to "scale", that needs to "be elegant", that you arent focused on maintainability for the next decade. That its built for purpose and left behind. Its all the code that for a programer would normally be in this matrix https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth your time) -

Yeah, for someone like me in a lot of ways it's a dream come true. I have domain expertise in my field, I have a ton of computer knowledge due to building HPC clusters and working in Linux every day for years, I have lots of problems computers can solve, but no formal programming expertise. Before, muddling through Python or fixing segfaults in academic software would have been days to weeks. Now it's minutes.

I think that (understandably) HN is full of professional programmers for whom code is the product, and so LLMs are often viewed through that lens. But for someone like me, a drug is the product, not code. One off vibe coded slop is both fine, and often an upgrade over the academic software I was using.

For instance, last week I took a piece of software that decompresses a TIFF file and multithreaded it for an almost 4x speedup. I'd always known it was single threaded and it irked me because I could see my pipelines waiting for it to catch up, but I never had the expertise in C++ to go fix it. Claude did it in 30 minutes and I didn't even have to go through the hassle of compiling it again - it did that too.

What I don't know is, if someone wasn't in the trenches for a decade learning how computers work, would the results be as good?

Re: AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

#97

Post by arionhardison »

marstall wrote: post #90
arionhardison wrote: post #48

I think the real win here is for idiots like me: A) no education B) no resources C) not smart enough to be a self-taught bio-hacker Everyone hears "AI is going to cure disease" and pictures some cure-all pill from a bio lab which is what I feel this paper is hinting at is missingb but that's the top of the funnel; I'm at the bottom where patients live and that is where AI is already quietly working. Its just not bein…

cool. i like what you've done here with a virtual panel that can answer questions ... i have similar ideas for kabuki syndrome (currently: https://www.thekabukipapers.org ). talk? marstall at gmail.

> i like what you've done here with a virtual panel that can answer questions

Thats the main thing. I think that Ai-native governance by domain experts is how AI reaches its full potential. Not in theory but in terms of the value it delivers to populations via outcomes.

AI-native Governance is like irrigation for the outcomes populations want to achieve, starts with intents; executed on by programs that use protocols as guardrails. This is a gross oversimplification of the process but based what i see from your work you will get the abstract.

Examples -

dietmanager.com - RDN governance

crohns.ai - AGA (MD/GI) governance

.us.codify.city - City council Governance

  https://san-francisco.ca.us.codify.city/

  https://new-york.ny.us.codify.city/

  http://chicago.il.us.codify.city/
Even applies to YC: https://openyc.org

Each codify.* is a PDA [Public Domain Agent] - that gets delegated intents per request and has to manage its own "deal" - its also managed democratically via ontology and downline policies set by the experts in said field and has feedback loop to verify/optimize policy outcomes.

This concept applies to everything IMO, and I cannot say I fully understand it but im absolutely obsessed with the exploration of the idea; again - in practice not theory. I have real outcomes in healthcare, education and housing.

Re: AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

#98

Post by arionhardison »

arionhardison wrote: post #97
marstall wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cool. i like what you've done here with a virtual panel that can answer questions ... i have similar ideas for kabuki syndrome (currently: https://www.thekabukipapers.org ). talk? marstall at gmail.

> i like what you've done here with a virtual panel that can answer questions Thats the main thing. I think that Ai-native governance by domain experts is how AI reaches its full potential. Not in theory but in terms of the value it delivers to populations via outcomes. AI-native Governance is like irrigation for the outcomes populations want to achieve, starts with intents; executed on by programs that use protocols…

I just fixed Crohn's AI council, it's now all members of the AGA but i'm having serious issues keeping it all up.

The jobs to harvest the corpus needed to create each agent is not scaling well.

Note: crohns.ai: 3,948 gastroenterologists, dietmanager.com: 1,752 RDNs

Re: AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

#99

Post by tclarke142 »

What I increasingly see at my Biotech is more and more AI assisted drug candidates but no corresponding improvement in the capacity or ability to manufacture and scale them. I think it's a problem that groups like Anthropic will encounter in a few months/years and one that will annoye them a lot because it's not as simple as throwing more compute, people or money at it.

Re: AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

#100

Post by consensus1 »

bharatsuthar wrote: post #78
consensus1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psilocybin has this effect. Source: I can't remember where I read it, so low confidence.

Sure, but what kind of protocol are you going to use to actually reap the benefits of these transient neuroplasticity effects, especially for learning something new like math or piano as an adult? Same with ketamine. It's not like you can take it a couple of times and open some magic window where everything suddenly becomes easier to learn. From my personal experience and surface-level understanding of the current re…

I don't know. I was just suggesting something that may have an effect. BTW I would be very hesitant to take anything that "opens some magic window where everything suddenly becomes easier to learn" if it existed. Increasing neuroplasticity to that degree is unlikely to be without significant side effects.
Post reply on HN