62 points raahelb 59 minutes ago 28 comments

bonsai_spool 25 minutes ago | parent

Very cool! However, the amazing absence of results makes me question whether they've got a Nature letter forthcoming or whether they know that another AI lab has a similar finding...

eqmvii 19 minutes ago | parent

In a year or two, articles like this will either be artifacts from peak hype or evidence of the beginning of the singularity. Right?

BobbyJo 16 minutes ago | parent

Yes. I would bet on the latter.

dude250711 15 minutes ago | parent

That's black and white thinking; it will be a midgularity - so neither.

kikokikokiko 10 minutes ago | parent

Mehgularity

demritocracy 7 minutes ago | parent

Whompageddon

pizza234 14 minutes ago | parent

The singularity, as defined by Hinton (and others) as RSI (Recursive Self Improvement) may actually be beginning already, as OpenAI has announced an AI acting as a "research intern" (!).

mullingitover 18 minutes ago | parent

This is great, but I can't help but wonder if we're going to have another post next week with a lab complaining that they were about to publish this same finding, and they had Claude proofread their paper, and whoops how'd that get into Anthropic's training data?

petcat 7 minutes ago | parent

Lots of stuff gets discovered by AI bots that was always hidden in plain sight. They're remarkably good at "connecting the dots".

caaqil 7 minutes ago | parent

I am going to assume that life science researchers are less egotistic and less prone to anti-tech hysteria (i.e., more exposed/accustomed to the benefits of tech) unlike mathematicians who thought pen and paper was all they needed because their incredible 2-3 SD IQs was all the processing they needed and any evidence of a stochastic parrot pattern-matching aggressively faster than they could was simply cheating.

jjtheblunt 6 minutes ago | parent

the article says the reverse transcriptase had been noticed before, but apparently only Claude commented on the subsequence repeating, to your point.

aakil 13 minutes ago | parent

This shows why biology is so much harder a problem area for LLMs than math, finding RTs is tedious but pretty doable today, they had to scope the problem down a lot from something that would be the equivalent of Navier Stokes in biology. Glad they’re doing it though, even if it’s just marketing.

wild_pointer 5 minutes ago | parent

Hurray! Vibe coded enzymes!

ex1fm3ta 2 minutes ago | parent

LLMs are really good at discovering patterns on huge dataset. Google also had similair breakthrough discoveries they stopped marketing them

MachineMan 2 minutes ago | parent

Don't use it for biology, Dario said, as he turned humans into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.. I reckon that soon, he too will return to dimension X.