62 points raahelb 1 hour ago 31 comments

bonsai_spool 28 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 22 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 18 minutes ago | parent

Yes. I would bet on the latter.

dude250711 18 minutes ago | parent

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

kikokikokiko 13 minutes ago | parent

Mehgularity

demritocracy 9 minutes ago | parent

Whompageddon

pizza234 17 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 21 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 10 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 9 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 8 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 15 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 7 minutes ago | parent

Hurray! Vibe coded enzymes!

ex1fm3ta 5 minutes ago | parent

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

MachineMan 5 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.