Personalized medical treatment looks like the most promising candidate so far, would that do it for you?
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There's a video by Siliconversations [0] about it. Medicine is first and foremost limited by high-quality data, not intelligence. If OpenAI built a superhuman AGI tomorrow, it would not change a thing about the state of cancer treatment, at least not for a while.
Trying to design a cancer cure by setting a trillion alight on AI is like trying to achieve UBI by funneling citizen's taxes into Polymarket, so they may operate their free supermarket.
I don't think the above poster is talking about finding novel treatments, but rather that they're talking about aiding in diagnosis and navigating existing treatment options.
We always wish that our doctors would stay up to date on all of the current medical literature as they practice, and some of them do. In theory, AI systems could greatly accelerate a person's ability to retrieve and extract insights from the current body of knowledge.
Of course, that is highly fraught, but, in theory, I think I see what they're going for.
How can we be sure of that when we don't even know what improved "intelligence" might look like in this context? Especially given the increased importance of "big data" (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics etc.) to the field and the sheer amount of obscure data that's currently buried in all sorts of archival sources and might be resurfaced with some "intelligence".
What exactly does “personalized medical treatment” entail?
Writing prescriptions?
Ok, I can see how AI could theoretically do that (assuming it doesn’t hallucinate and kill a bunch of people). Oh and don’t think it’ll be so easy to give AI the legal authority to prescribe controlled substances. And insurance companies may take issue with expensive prescriptions written by a chat bot.
Perform surgeries? Stitch wounds?
That’s decades away. And that also opens a legal can of worms. Maybe the AI lawyers can figure something out.
maybe he's referring to people doing research on their own variant of disease through LLMs to find cures
That’s fine and dandy but it won’t do anything for most people with serious health problems.
Some people (albeit probably not a lot) are really doing this for complex life threatening cases:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47556729 (gitlab founder leveraging AI tools to find cure for his rare cancer)
Yes. But unfortunately that domain suffers from ambiguity which LLMs are bad at.
Medical treatment has never been about asking questions and getting perfect answers. Excellent doctors and nurse practitioners have a great intuition for which questions to ask based on cues during patient assessment.
Medical treatment is already personalized though.