YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse

39 points FacZap 1 hour ago 34 comments

glimshe 1 hour ago | parent

This is fascinating and scary at the same time. I dread the future when people will have access to cheaper health insurance with the caveat that all consultations and procedures will be performed solely by AI. Want a human? Pay extra.

sheikhnbake 48 minutes ago | parent

I imagine human consultation could be more expensive, at least in the US, due to liability of human error. Especially if/when AI capabilities in medical procedures becomes clearly superior.

rowanG077 48 minutes ago | parent

Why would you want a human? I don't see how anyone would pay more for worse care.

FacZap 27 minutes ago | parent

Humans are irrational. We also value "feeling" safe. Some tricks sell the illusion for those people who can't trust 100% some technologies.

Of course I trust engineering, I know planes are safe: but when there is turbulance and I see a flight attendant just casually walking and not even reacting to it, I feel better.

Humans are still humans.

Of course, culture changes. Colective ideas and institutions adapt. But extremely slowly compared to advances in tech.

Cthulhu_ 32 minutes ago | parent

This is already happening though, to a point; recently, local GPs have been subsumed into larger health care provider companies, and they have set up systems so that before you can make an appointment, you need to go through a wizard and / or chat interface. Likewise, people are encouraged to go to a website and do some self-diagnosis before calling a doctor - things like "if you have a fever, how high is it and for how long have you had it?"

It's indirectly related to health insurance cost, as we have a GP shortage and they (I presume?) realized a lot of people are making appointments and wasting a GP's time for trivialties like a cough or cold.

I'm pretty sure they already have, or are experimenting with having people go through an AI chatbot first. This is already very much a thing with any kind of customer support. It's not a new development though, the preceding generation was conversational interfaces.

rbinv 1 hour ago | parent

Very interesting.

Will we just throw LLMs at most problems in the future instead of smaller, custom models? Like Sonnet 5.5 in this case.

jwrallie 1 hour ago | parent

I felt scared for the little guy. Somehow Opus 5 refusing after understanding its limitations felt like the most humane thing in the article.

NateEag 26 minutes ago | parent

> Somehow Opus 5 refusing after understanding its limitations felt like the most humane thing in the article.

This is an unfortunately true and insightful comment.

andrewshadura 49 minutes ago | parent

"You were right to push back; I made an irreversible mistake during brain surgery, and unfortunately, what has happened cannot be undone."

markyc 43 minutes ago | parent

the load bearing part of the brain was removed

throwaway198846 35 minutes ago | parent

Is the load breaking part of the brain the prefrontal cortex or the brain stem?

tylfin 47 minutes ago | parent

What does the approval process look like here? The company website associated with the account fails to load, Exin Therapeutics

OleksandrC 46 minutes ago | parent

It looks like the Torment Nexus is already here. The design is very human.

wslh 44 minutes ago | parent

“It's not real, you're in a simulation, now imagine you're a surgeon...”

bio-s 44 minutes ago | parent

I don’t understand why would anyone consider this as an ethical experiment

giancarlostoro 43 minutes ago | parent

If we can even have robots that can perform critical surgeries with total precision and save more lives would that be bad?

ajcp 38 minutes ago | parent

It’s the process that’s unethical, not the outcome. The ends cannot justify the means in the scientific process.

sheikhnbake 27 minutes ago | parent

What is unethical about the process of using emerging technology in medical procedures?

PhunkyPhil 8 minutes ago | parent

How much issue do you take with animal testing in the rest of medicine? We already, more or less, torture an unfathomable amount of animals to get where we are.

throwaway198846 37 minutes ago | parent

Did they start with brain surgery or did they warm up on less consequential things like stitches?

0xbadcafebee 31 minutes ago | parent

That ship sailed a long time ago. Science decided that killing mice for experiments (regardless of the experiment) is fine. In fact, a large amount of the mice killed are just redundant (not needed for a particular experiment)

sillysaurusx 29 minutes ago | parent

It’s a mouse. If you think feeding one to a snake is ethical, then it’s a little strange this would be unethical. At least the human has the mouse’s wellbeing at heart.

henrymerrilees 17 minutes ago | parent

Not saying that this resolves the broader issue, but I'm not aware of any vegetarian snakes. It seems possible to differentiate this from animal experimentation.

bensyverson 11 minutes ago | parent

Are you vegan?

catlifeonmars 15 minutes ago | parent

That’s not quite equivalent. For one, a responsible owner is not feeding live mice to a snake. There’s at least an opportunity to ethically euthanize the mice prior to the act.

> At least the human has the mouse’s wellbeing at heart.

You don’t know this to be true

paxy 10 minutes ago | parent

The term "lab rats" exists for a reason. This is in the bottom 10% of weird shit people do to animals for research.

RandomLensman 31 minutes ago | parent

Feels like on boundary of surgery (injecting as opposed to cutting, moving, sowing, etc.) - but maybe I am missing something.

adamsmark 31 minutes ago | parent

The mouse survived!

I noticed that the first tweet made no mention if the mouse survived. Seemed a little...sus.

catlifeonmars 13 minutes ago | parent

> The mouse survived!

Without more context, I’m not sure if that’s better or worse

alnwlsn 27 minutes ago | parent

Boy, that's one sketchy looking ESTOP button. I hope the mouse doesn't know it comes in a 2-pack on Amazon for $9.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JP4JKY6

joshhug 18 minutes ago | parent

Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse

Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse, yeah

'Cause I was sittin' there bored to death

And in just 18 hours in front of my laptop

It picked the drug

It picked the brain region

It drove the stereotactic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanoliters while watching the entry site through the rig cameras for bleeding, girl

thebiglebrewski 11 minutes ago | parent

Haha amazing, we need more humor on HN...

burkaman 16 minutes ago | parent

Can anyone knowledgeable interpret what was actually done here? It doesn't sound like "performed brain surgery" is accurate.

> Watching our surgeon do the craniotomy, which the agent is not allowed to do yet for safety reasons

I think the only action it took was sending commands to lower a needle to a certain location, inject, and then remove it. But then it sounds like it couldn't actually choose a valid location and this guy had to manually override it? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, talking about this post: https://x.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867 (https://xxcancel.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867).

I know there is always endless goalpost-moving in these kind of discussions but I really do think there's an important difference between "performed brain surgery" and "observed brain surgery and ran inject(3.9, 4, 4.3) at one point". And there's also no discussion here of whether this decision made any medical sense and what impact it had on the mouse besides not killing it.