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Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent

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Re: Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent

#33

Post by monadoid »

joelthelion wrote: post #32

This is really cool, but I think the big question is whether it works and whether it's useful to a professional. Is there anyone in the field who could comment on this?

that's definitely a big question but I don't think it's the big question. this is 100% progress and it's standalone cool

Re: Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent

#36

Post by i000 »

monadoid wrote: post #33
joelthelion wrote: post #32

This is really cool, but I think the big question is whether it works and whether it's useful to a professional. Is there anyone in the field who could comment on this?

that's definitely a big question but I don't think it's the big question. this is 100% progress and it's standalone cool

If utility/value is not "the" big question, what is?

Re: Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent

#37

Post by slacktivism123 »

mrlongroots wrote: post #10
gronky_ wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it a bit differently - LLMs are an incredible innovation but it’s hard to do anything useful with them without the right wrapper. A good wrapper has deep domain knowledge baked into it, combined with automation and expert use of the LLM. It maybe isn’t super innovative but it’s a bit of an art form and unlocks the utility of the underlying LLM

Exactly. To present a potential usecase: there's a ridiculous and massive backlog in the Indian judicial system. LLMs can be let loose on the entire workflow: triage cases (simple, complicated, intractable, grouped by legal principles or parties), pull up related caselaw, provide recommendations, throw more LLMs and more reasoning at unclear problems. Now you can't do this with just a desktop and chatgpt, you need a…

>doing that unlocks potentially billions of dollars of value that is otherwise elusive

What's more, it unlocks potentially new additions to the 206 legal cases where generative AI produced hallucinated (fake) content.

https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

Re: Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent

#38

Post by govideo »

panabee wrote: post #28
freedomben wrote: post #2

Awesome! This is the type of stuff I'm most excited about with AI - improvements to medical research and capabilities. AI can be awesome at identifying patterns in data that humans can't, and there has to be troves of data out there full of patterns that we aren't catching. Of course there's also the possibility of engineering new drugs/treatments and things, which is also super exciting.

Agreed. There is deep potential for ML in healthcare. We need more contributors advancing research in this space. One opportunity as people look around: many priors merit reconsideration. For instance, genomic data that may seem identical may not actually be identical. In classic biological representations (FASTA), canonical cytosine and methylated cytosine are both collapsed into the letter "C" even though differenc…

I'd love to hear more of our thoughts re open questions in biomedical ML. You sound like you have a crisp, nuanced grasp the landscape, which is rare. That would be very helpful to me, as an undergrad in CS (with bio) trying to crystalize research to pursue in bio/ML/GenAI.

Thank you.

Re: Biomni: A General-Purpose Biomedical AI Agent

#40

Post by panabee »

govideo wrote: post #38
panabee wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There is deep potential for ML in healthcare. We need more contributors advancing research in this space. One opportunity as people look around: many priors merit reconsideration. For instance, genomic data that may seem identical may not actually be identical. In classic biological representations (FASTA), canonical cytosine and methylated cytosine are both collapsed into the letter "C" even though differenc…

I'd love to hear more of our thoughts re open questions in biomedical ML. You sound like you have a crisp, nuanced grasp the landscape, which is rare. That would be very helpful to me, as an undergrad in CS (with bio) trying to crystalize research to pursue in bio/ML/GenAI. Thank you.

Thanks, but no one truly understands biomedicine, let alone biomedical ML.

Feynman's quote -- "A scientist is never certain" -- is apt for biomedical ML.

Context: imagine the human body as the most devilish operating system ever: 10b+ lines of code (more than merely genomics), tight coupling everywhere, zero comments. Oh, and one faulty line may cause death.

Are you more interested in data, ML, or biology (e.g., predicting cancerous mutations or drug toxicology)?

Biomedical data underlies everything and may be the easiest starting point because it's so bad/limited.

We had to pay Stanford doctors to annotate QA questions because existing datasets were so unreliable. (MCQ dataset partially released, full release coming).

For ML, MedGemma from Google DeepMind is open and at the frontier.

Biology mostly requires publishing, but still there are ways to help.

After sharing preferences, I can offer a more targeted path.

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