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The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

writingruxandrabio.com

151–160 of 192 posts

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% sure it's BS though. How can anyone believe that a guy could use a text-generating AI to design a novel cancer treatment , but not write some compliance document ? Come on!

The LLM didn't oneshot the mRNA treatment, it merely suggested the idea. Most of the steps in the process were done with specialized tools. And no novel treatments were invented wholesale, it's more applying a documented process with existing open-source tools that's just too personalized and expensive to be offered by any vet. I find this story perfectly plausible.

Why do you find the idea of a man complaining about having painstakingly hand typed a 100 page document over three month when he claims he can use an LLM in a way pretty much no-one has before him?

It's several orders of magnitude easier to get an LLM fill some kind of red tape than it could be to use it in the way he claims to have used it.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. It's possible to think that there are cases where lowering the cost of first phase trials or making it relatively simple for people capable of offering informed consent to obtain access to existing safe medications currently undergoing trials for their specific ailments and thinking that a person who claims to have "designed an RNA vaccine" by asking an LLM to teach him about RNA and now wants to inject it into…

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.ycombinato…

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?

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if we let doctors do medicine instead of letting profiteering beancounters optimize for number go up.

Step therapy is required in countries with universal healthcare, too. It can actually be harder to get access to new therapies in countries with universal healthcare because they’re more uniform and strict in what they allow. For a relatable example: The UK just raised the age of eligibility for COVID vaccines all the way up to 75 years old: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/covid-russian-roulette-... Contrast thi…

To be honest, given the issues with the NHS, the UK isn't the best example to use for a "universal healthcare" system these days.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean we do let them do that unless you aren't able to pay them for it. If you're the minority that has very large sums of money your doctors can decide what treatment works best, but for everyone else their healthcare is dictated by some company whose only concern is increasing the amount of profit they rake in and they'd happily see you dead if it would improve their bottom line.

Your comment contains nothing of value. If you have a better way to allocate scarce resources please state it.

In the US the allocation process itself is very expensive. Something like a third of the cost goes towards paying the administrative costs of navigating the byzantine insurance rules.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#155
post #107

For those of modest means there is also the "fail first" insurance process where you need to use less expensive therapies before a more appropriate therapy is approved. Each failure can be costly to a patient's health, often exacting irreversible comorbidities, not even considering lost work, family wellbeing, and pain/suffering. For those with rare diseases, insurance also doesn't help with "N of 1" efforts. A case…

Imagine if we let doctors do medicine instead of letting profiteering beancounters optimize for number go up.

[dead]

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.ycombinato…

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?

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

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM didn't oneshot the mRNA treatment, it merely suggested the idea. Most of the steps in the process were done with specialized tools. And no novel treatments were invented wholesale, it's more applying a documented process with existing open-source tools that's just too personalized and expensive to be offered by any vet. I find this story perfectly plausible.

Why do you find the idea of a man complaining about having painstakingly hand typed a 100 page document over three month when he claims he can use an LLM in a way pretty much no-one has before him? It's several orders of magnitude easier to get an LLM fill some kind of red tape than it could be to use it in the way he claims to have used it.

He is not using an LLM in some new and exciting way. The process of making a personalized mRNA vaccine looks something like this:

1. Collect and sequence patient's normal and tumor genomes 2. Predict immunogenic neoantigens from genome 3. Generate optimized mRNA sequence from neoantigens 4. Create vaccine from sequence

modulo some variations, which I wrote off the top of my head because I understand this technology.

Steps 1 and 4 are done by contracted labs. Steps 2 and 3 are doable through open-source computational tools and a little engineering. What does ChatGPT do here? ChatGPT explains the process, finds labs that will do 1 and 4 for pay, finds published algorithms and data for steps 2 and 3. It's barely more complicated than what ChatGPT would do to help a student with their homework.

Legal documents, on the other hand? Have you ever tried to get an LLM to do your taxes? It's not easy.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

> 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.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#159
The bureaucracy isn't trying to be utilitarian, it's trying to be democratic, and the people don't want utilitarianism. No politician wants to be the one who removed the red tape that would've stopped the reckless professor from poisoning all those children with his botched clinical trial.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean we do let them do that unless you aren't able to pay them for it. If you're the minority that has very large sums of money your doctors can decide what treatment works best, but for everyone else their healthcare is dictated by some company whose only concern is increasing the amount of profit they rake in and they'd happily see you dead if it would improve their bottom line.

Your comment contains nothing of value. If you have a better way to allocate scarce resources please state it.

These resources are only scarce because of artificial scarcity.

This is especially true of patent medicines, where it's government enforced artificial scarcity.

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