'Wildly off-base and impossible': Anthropic boss Dario Amodei says AI will cure cancer in a matter of years. Doctors disagree

But as nightmarish as the potential scenarios he’s imagined for the future of machine learning have been, Amodei has, in the same breath, issued some rather lofty predictions for how it could be used for good, especially given how fast it’s progressing.

He’s particularly looking forward to future medical applications, saying he believes algorithms will enable us to not just better detect illness, but to completely cure “most human disease” in about five to 10 years.

“I think there’s a number of very positive things that are going to happen. I think AI has exactly the kind of skills that are needed to cure important diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s,” Amodei said in an interview with Fox News.

But actual doctors don’t seem to agree. Some have even called the AI guru’s projections “wildly off-base” and completely “impossible.”

Experts say proposed timeline is unrealistic

Cognitive scientist, author and AI expert Gary Marcus wrote a Substack post in response to Amodei’s assertion, titled, “No, Dario Amodei, we will not be curing cancer and ‘most human disease’ in five to ten years.”

In it, he called Amodei’s timeline “so naive as to be absurd, both with respect to how medical science works and why it is challenging,” emphasizing work that machines will simply never be able to speed up: multi-phase pre-clinical and clinical testing.

He cited multiple peers, such as Eric Topol, who pointed out that there are currently zero universally effective medications for curing non-infectious disease, which suggests a poor prognosis for any miraculous panaceas in the next few years, AI or not.

But Amodei has addressed similar criticisms in the past.

Amodei’s biology background

Before deeming the tech executive’s vision as little more than bombast, the 43-year-old Californian was actually a biologist prior to getting into the AI game. Amodei specialized in researching cures for cancer.

In one of two lengthy essays he’s penned on AI’s future — one positive, one decidedly more negative — Amodei wrote that his lab background “strongly suggests to me that there are hundreds of discoveries waiting to be made if scientists were smarter and better at making connections between the vast amount of biological knowledge humanity possesses.”

This is where AI, he believes, will step in, though he also sees it becoming “a virtual biologist” capable of going beyond simply aggregating and analyzing existing knowledge.

“If our core hypothesis about AI progress is correct, then the right way to think of AI is not as a method of data analysis, but as a virtual biologist who performs all the tasks biologists do, including designing and running experiments, inventing new biological methods or measurement techniques, and so on,” he wrote nearly two years ago. He used Alzheimer’s as one example of “exactly the type of problem that can be solved with better measurement tools that isolate biological effects.”

But he admitted that a task like finding and testing something like a potential cure for cancer “may have an irreducible minimum that cannot be decreased further even as intelligence continues to increase.”