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

A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 62 posts

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#51

Post by impossiblefork »

drumhead wrote: post #50

Sometimes it feels like Google are so far ahead in AI but all we get to see are mediocre LLMs from Open AI. Like they're not sharing the really good stuff with everyone.

I think I believe OpenAI's claim that they have better models that are too expensive to serve up to people.

I think Google have only trained what they feel they need, and not a megamodel, but I can't justify this view other as some kind of general feeling. They obviously know enough to make excellent models though, so I doubt they're behind in any meaningful sense.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#52

Post by saulpw »

drumhead wrote: post #50

Sometimes it feels like Google are so far ahead in AI but all we get to see are mediocre LLMs from Open AI. Like they're not sharing the really good stuff with everyone.

When they do, someone like OpenAI comes along and runs the VC enshittification playbook on it.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#53

Post by NitpickLawyer »

impossiblefork wrote: post #51
drumhead wrote: post #50

Sometimes it feels like Google are so far ahead in AI but all we get to see are mediocre LLMs from Open AI. Like they're not sharing the really good stuff with everyone.

I think I believe OpenAI's claim that they have better models that are too expensive to serve up to people. I think Google have only trained what they feel they need, and not a megamodel, but I can't justify this view other as some kind of general feeling. They obviously know enough to make excellent models though, so I doubt they're behind in any meaningful sense.

This has been said by enough people in the know to be considered true by now. Not just from oAI, but also Anthropic and Meta have said this before. You train the best of the best, and then use it to distill/curate/inform the next training run, on something that makes sense to serve at scale. That's how you get from GPT4 / o3 prices (80$/60$ /Mtok) to gpt5 prices (10$ /Mtok) to gpt5-mini (2$ /Mtok).

Then you use a combination of the best models to amplify your training set, and enhance it for the next iteration. And then repeat the process at gen n+1.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#54

Post by alganet »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41
alganet wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these safety teams subject to the oversight of more estabilished international agreements and safeguards?

> the oversight of more estabilished international agreements and safeguards? “Unlike the chemical or nuclear weapons regimes, the [Biological Weapons Convention] lacks both a system to verify states' compliance with the treaty and a separate international organization to support the convention's effective implementation” [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention

The UN has a page on Biological Weapons.

https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr...

You can read more about the efforts for disarmament there.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#55

Post by lnenad »

emp17344 wrote: post #47
lnenad wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading comments around AI is always fun > It's not like the model has devised new knowledge. Kind of a low hanging fruit. Just keep moving goalposts.

What goalposts do you think were moved? Please elaborate.

Every AI post is either filled with negative comments stating that AI can just regurgitate stuff. This states otherwise and the comment I replied to tries to downplay that.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#56

Post by lta »

It doesn't compensate for all the other bad stuff google's doing. Long gone are the times were I looked up to google as a champion of good technologies. When I read this I'm just sad such en important step of humankind's technological future is in the hand of evil(-ishbat least) companies

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#57

Post by aktuel »

epistasis wrote: post #46
aktuel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone discovers anything, it does not change anything if someone else could have discovered it theoretically as well?

If a simple majority classifier has the same performance as a fancy model with 58 layers of transformers, and you use your fancy model instead of the majority classifier, is it the model that's doing the discovery or is it the operator that choose to look in a particular place?

I am all for crediting humans and I don't particularly fancy all the anthropomorphising myself. However rubbing it in now feels similarly pointless as suggesting the US should switch to metric.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#58

Post by epistasis »

aktuel wrote: post #57
epistasis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a simple majority classifier has the same performance as a fancy model with 58 layers of transformers, and you use your fancy model instead of the majority classifier, is it the model that's doing the discovery or is it the operator that choose to look in a particular place?

I am all for crediting humans and I don't particularly fancy all the anthropomorphising myself. However rubbing it in now feels similarly pointless as suggesting the US should switch to metric.

Well it's important, because the particular new lead for drug targeting is not super valuable, they are a dime a dozen, easier to find than a startup idea. Actually driving a successful drug development program is an entirely different matter that can only be established with $10-$100M of early exploration, with a successful drug costing much more to get to market.

It could also be that particular prioritization method that uses Gemma is useful in its own, but we won't know that unless it is somehow benchmarked against the many alternatives that have been used up until now. And in other benchmark settings, these cell sentence methods have not been that impressive.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#59

Post by JumpCrisscross »

alganet wrote: post #54
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the oversight of more estabilished international agreements and safeguards? “Unlike the chemical or nuclear weapons regimes, the [Biological Weapons Convention] lacks both a system to verify states' compliance with the treaty and a separate international organization to support the convention's effective implementation” [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention

The UN has a page on Biological Weapons. https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr... You can read more about the efforts for disarmament there.

Where is there oversight?

Biological weapons compliance is entirely voluntary. We don’t have international monitors watching America and Russia’s smallpox stockpiles. That’s left to each nation.

Re: A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

#60

Post by alganet »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #59
alganet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UN has a page on Biological Weapons. https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr... You can read more about the efforts for disarmament there.

Where is there oversight? Biological weapons compliance is entirely voluntary. We don’t have international monitors watching America and Russia’s smallpox stockpiles. That’s left to each nation.

Your angle is "there is no oversight, why are you asking for it?". It's the same overall angle as the guy who was spreading covid rumours here in this thread.

There are efforts at estabilishing it though. And it's hard and expensive for wet labs, but it could be much simpler for things like simulating biological pathways.

One could also see your response as "other nations are developing threats, we should race", which I personally think is misguided.

Instead of these petty armchair discussions, we should instead focus on being more serious about it.

Post reply on HN