[HN Gopher] New antibiotic targets IBD and AI predicted how it w...
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New antibiotic targets IBD and AI predicted how it would work
Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-025-02142-0
Author : KLK2019
Score : 190 points
Date : 2025-10-04 01:09 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (healthsci.mcmaster.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (healthsci.mcmaster.ca)
| KLK2019 wrote:
| Here is the original study published in nature microbiology.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-025-02142-0
|
| Wanted to share what I thought the interesting parts. From the
| university press release.
|
| "To date, AI has been leveraged as a tool for predicting which
| molecules might have therapeutic potential, but this study used
| it to describe what researchers call "mechanism of action" (MOA)
| -- or how drugs attack disease.
|
| MOA studies, he says, are essential for drug development. They
| help scientists confirm safety, optimize dosage, make
| modifications to improve efficacy, and sometimes even uncover
| entirely new drug targets. They also help regulators determine
| whether or not a given drug candidate is suitable for use in
| humans... A thorough MOA study can take up to two years and cost
| around $2 million; however, using AI, his group did enterololin's
| in just six months and for just $60,000.
|
| Indeed, after his lab's discovery of the new antibiotic, Stokes
| connected with colleagues at MIT's Computer Science and
| Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) to see if any of their
| emerging machine learning platforms could help fast-track his
| upcoming MOA studies.
|
| In just 100 seconds, he was given a prediction: his new drug
| attacked a microscopic protein complex called LolCDE, which is
| essential to the survival of certain bacteria.
|
| "A lot of AI use in drug discovery has been about searching
| chemical space, identifying new molecules that might be active,"
| says Regina Barzilay, a professor in MIT's School of Engineering
| and the developer of DiffDock, the AI model that made the
| prediction. "What we're showing here is that AI can also provide
| mechanistic explanations, which are critical for moving a
| molecule through the development pipeline."
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| > Indeed, after his lab's discovery of the new antibiotic,
| Stokes connected with colleagues at MIT's Computer Science and
| Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) to see if any of their
| emerging machine learning platforms could help fast-track his
| upcoming MOA studies.
|
| It must be so cool to work at a university. You can just walk
| across campus to meet with experts and learn about or apply the
| cutting edge of any given field to solve whatever problem
| you're interested in.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| That's only if there are experts there. The average college
| is not really what you're thinking it is.
| noosphr wrote:
| You can email them and they are usually quite happy to
| talk.
|
| Of course not when they get a media storm like these
| people. But I regularly correspond with experts in adjacent
| fields who have interesting papers put out.
| touisteur wrote:
| Can confirm that most of the times when
| reproducing/implementing a paper or trying to extend it
| to another field, researchers are pretty OK (some very
| enthusiastic) to chat over email about it. As long as
| you've actually read the paper(s) or read the code (if
| any), and there's no expected free-work...
|
| I sometimes get unpublished artefacts
| (matlab/python/fortran code, data samples) just by...
| asking nicely, showing interest. And I'm not even in
| academia or a lab.
| nick__m wrote:
| In my sample of 1 with cold email to a researcher was
| that they are enthusiastic when someone has read their
| paper and ask relevant questions.
|
| I don't remember the paper subject neither the researcher
| name (more than 20yr ago) but I remember that she was an
| ornitologist, the subject was quite niche and the
| response I received to my questions was longer than the
| article that prompted me to asks them.
| jancsika wrote:
| The Reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect-- one vastly
| underestimates the work it took to reach a conclusion in a
| book they haven't finished reading. Then, without reading
| another page, they assume everything in the entire
| bookshelf is at the same shallow level as their own
| misapprehension of the book they didn't finish.
|
| I rankly speculate: for the set of low-effort comments on
| HN, there are more Reverse Gell-Manns than there are Gell-
| Manns.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| There are 1000s of state and community colleges. Not
| everyone is doing groundbreaking research. Some places,
| they just teach, which is fine. Additionally, I have no
| idea what you're trying to say.
| overfeed wrote:
| There are experts at every single state and community
| college, with PhDs being thr typical floor.
|
| > Not everyone is doing groundbreaking research.
|
| They don't need to be, they only need to be able to
| understand recent, groundbreaking papers in their fields,
| and be able to bounce ideas with colleagues in different
| disciplines who walk up to them.
|
| Insinuating that faculty staff are either on the bleeding
| edge or useless is a false dichotomy.
| Fomite wrote:
| Can confirm it is often very cool to be able to do this.
| nick__m wrote:
| Working in a university that has significant research
| facilities is awesome.
|
| Even when you work in administration, learning opportunities
| abound and are easy to seize.
|
| I'm too shy to just walk into a random lab and ask questions,
| but three times a year, my boss likes to organize a tour of a
| different research facility and I really appreciate that.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| > A thorough MOA study can take up to two years and cost around
| $2 million; however, using AI, his group did enterololin's in
| just six months and for just $60,000.
|
| Beautiful, finally something for ai/machine learning that is
| not a coding autocomplete or image generation usage.
|
| It would be very interesting to keep track of this area for the
| next 10 years, between alpha fold for protein folding and this
| to predict how it will behave, how cost is reduced and trials
| get fast tracked
| Zafira wrote:
| Based on the paper for DiffDock
| (https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.01776) it looks like it was a
| great use case for a diffusion model.
|
| > We thus frame molecular docking as a generative modeling
| problem--given a ligand and target protein structure, we
| learn a distribution over ligand poses.
|
| I just hope work on these very valid use cases doesn't get
| negatively impacted when the AI bubble inevitably bursts.
| noosphr wrote:
| Does anyone have the pre-print? I'm not affiliated with a
| university any more and the usual suspects don't upload papers
| overnight any more.
| mywacaday wrote:
| Their inboxs might be overflowing but researchers usually
| happy to email a copy if you don't have access elsewhere
| fmbb wrote:
| Is DiffDock a large language model?
|
| Because that is what the general public believes AI means, and
| Open AI say they are building thinking machines with it, and
| this headline says "predicted".
| zachthewf wrote:
| No it's a diffusion model trained on proteins
| esafak wrote:
| It's a 3D equivariant graph neural network; a class of models
| that was hot before LLMs stole the limelight.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_neural_network
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| What????
|
| We knew that LolCDE was a vulnerability to e coli since well
| before 2016 and knew inhibitors of the complex, globomycin
| being one of them, which they knew about since 1978
|
| https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/jb.00502-16
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/353012/
|
| Is enterololin just another from of globomycin?
|
| Is AI smart or are scientists just getting dumber?
| nisten wrote:
| Yes.
| raincom wrote:
| AI just picked up these references and gave an answer.
| Scientists in this field should have read these papers
| instead of relying on AI.
| rdedev wrote:
| From what I understand they used a diffusion model
| (diffdock) to predict the mechanism. These types of models
| are not LLMs that need to be trained on text
| D-Coder wrote:
| There are probably 37,392 papers on this. So your "should"
| is probably just impossible for humans.
| Ifkaluva wrote:
| Is it well-established that IBD is caused by E Colli? Is it like
| a sensitivity to E Colli?
| voxl wrote:
| We don't know. It's probably a combo of genetic factors and
| bacteria. It's at the very least complicated and multifaceted,
| because you can't just take a culture or biopsy of inflamed
| skin and say "A ha! This is clearly different!"
|
| All the most effective treatments try to turn off parts of the
| immune system, and even though have minor success with some
| patients going through multiple different immunosuppressants to
| find the right one, or even cocktail, that adequately manages
| the disease.
| smeej wrote:
| It's also the case that there is a bewildering variety of
| things that get sort of lumped together as "IBD." Crohn's and
| ulcerative colitis are two of them, but there's no particular
| reason to assume inflammatory bowel diseases all have the
| same set of causes. Pretty much all of them are made worse by
| an e. coli infection, though, so a drug that can target _just
| those_ bacteria is helpful!
|
| During my own IBD journey, I've managed to stump the heck out
| of two different teams of GIs. I had been diagnosed with UC
| by biopsy during colonoscopy, and then at my last
| colonoscopy, despite not having been on medication for more
| than two years, they determined not only that I don't have it
| now, but that I never did. They told me "remission" would
| look different from "this bowel has never had IBD." But they
| also insisted I had not been misdiagnosed.
|
| And yet they told me with a straight face that it is
| incurable. I had it in the past, confirmed by pathology. I
| don't have it now. And it's incurable. I give up.
|
| In the end, I don't care enough to fight them about the
| contradiction, because the part I most care about is the "I
| don't have it now" part, and we're all in agreement on that.
|
| (Note for any who are interested: I stopped medication after
| successfully reducing my inflammation markers within normal
| limits by eating the exact same thing for every single meal
| for 20 months with no cheating of any kind. They told me that
| shouldn't have been possible either, but it worked. And yes,
| it was as miserable as it sounds, but less miserable than
| living with UC.)
| jgord wrote:
| Any hypothesis for why eating only one thing would solve
| IBD ?
|
| Would that select for a particular biota / micro-fauna
| environment ? or cause less mechanical / chemical
| inflammation ?
|
| glad it worked in your case.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Not the person you're replying to, but my own IBD went
| away completely after I did keto for an extended period.
| This was a decade ago and it hasn't come back even as my
| diet returned to normal.
|
| In my n=1 experience, it seems maybe significant dietary
| changes can perturb the gut ecosystem out of whatever
| state corresponds to IBD.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| They sometimes can, but most properly gut-adapted
| microbes only have their relative prevalence reduced by
| diet changes, by and large people unfortunately tend to
| snap back once diet is discontinued.
|
| Ideally, you'd combine that with doing a stool transplant
| first, since it's the main thing (other than just
| antibiotics) that causes permanent compositional changes.
| jinnko wrote:
| I had a similar experience, i.e. strict keto for 9 months
| and fully came off meds with no signs of UC or asthma. UC
| came back after around 2 years and I don't remember how
| long before I had to start asthma meds again. I can no
| longer do keto though, each time I try I get palpitations
| now after around a week.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah my asthma went into remission as well, though this
| was also a period of my life when I was very physically
| active and in the best shape of my life, so it's hard to
| say what was the cause there.
| smeej wrote:
| I'm not a scientist on any level, so my theory only went
| as far as "stop irritating the thing and let it heal
| itself."
|
| When they started talking about putting me on immune-
| suppressant drugs during a pandemic, I thought that
| didn't sound like a very good idea, but maybe my body
| could sort itself out if I gave it the opportunity.
|
| Not a terribly sophisticated take, but it works for
| things like not popping blisters or picking at scabs, so
| it seemed worth a shot.
| ulfw wrote:
| Have you checked your Calprotectin levels?
| smeej wrote:
| Yes, that was one of the inflammatory markers they
| checked. At diagnosis, I was in the mid-400s. After
| medication, I was in the low-200s. After 20 months of
| this elimination diet, I was in the 20s.
|
| Multiple doctors told me it would not be possible to
| decrease the score without medication, one of them even
| while holding the results in his hands proving that I had
| done it.
| m_fayer wrote:
| Doctors are the only people I've encountered who are ready
| to inform you of their poorly supported contradictory
| conclusions with full confidence, and are fully ready to
| meet any pushback with gaslighting or the dreaded
| "difficult patient" label.
|
| They approach the phenomenon of dropping trust and respect
| for their profession in much the same way.
|
| It's really frustrating. I don't get why they feel entitled
| to acting this way when no one else does.
| rubyfan wrote:
| After making you wait 40 minutes later than when your
| appointment was supposed to start, I've looked at your
| chart for about 2 minutes and have spoken to you 60
| seconds I've confidently diagnosed you with X. Here's a
| prescription, let's see you back in 6 months.
| smeej wrote:
| My favorite is the "bless your heart" head tilt that
| strongly implies you're just too damn stupid to follow
| what they're saying, when it's obvious on its face that
| they're contradicting themselves.
|
| "I was correctly diagnosed with it before." "Correct." "I
| do not have it now." "Correct." "It is not 'in
| remission.' I just do not have the disease." "Correect."
| "But it isn't curable." "Correct." "So if it wasn't
| 'cured,' what _did_ happen to it? " {head tilt} "You tell
| me. Follow it through. You used to have it. You do not
| have it anymore. It's not in remission. But it also
| hasn't been cured. What does that leave?" "#$%^! I don't
| know! That's why I'm here, asking you! As far as I know,
| all it leaves is contradiction and impossibility!" "Now,
| now. There's no need to be difficult."
|
| (This is almost word for word the last conversation I had
| with my GI. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not paraphrasing. I
| went through it exactly like this, and she responded to
| me exactly like this.)
| nick__m wrote:
| My trick is to learn the terminology/jargon of the
| specialists by buying meds students used textbooks. It
| completely changes the conversation dynamics even if
| initially it appears to slightly confuse them.
|
| Sometimes it angers them but then it's a clear signal
| that you must see someone else ASAP. When we grilled my
| wife first oncologist on his protocol, he broke down and
| said that he was not up to date on the latest research.
| We requested someone else, he was a much better fit and
| most importantly she is still alive, her metastasis
| disappeared and the latest scans and bloodworks results
| are still NED (no evidence of disease).
| blauervogel wrote:
| Great to hear this worked for you! What was in the the
| meal? And how did you decide on exactly that meal?
| smeej wrote:
| The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken
| together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini,
| and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly
| wasn't soup anymore.
|
| I wanted it to be soft/easy to digest, but also
| nutritious. This was at least a wide enough variety of
| nutrients that I didn't feel miserable (just bored).
| hkt wrote:
| As someone with IBD who is on their fifth trip to the
| toilet since midnight (BST) I'd love to get the recipe.
| I've got a few months of steroids ahead and anything more
| long term and high impact is of enormous interest.
| smeej wrote:
| The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken
| together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini,
| and butternut squash cooked in its juice in a pan until
| it mostly wasn't soup anymore. Salt to taste, but it's
| never gonna be delicious. It's tolerable. It's even
| fairly enjoyable once or twice. It's not a bad meal. But
| boy is it a tedious one after awhile.
| hkt wrote:
| Interesting, what was the reasoning behind it?
| azinman2 wrote:
| Which markers? What meal? Why that meal?
|
| Note it also could return; looks can be deceiving.
| rubyfan wrote:
| Or it was never there to begin with.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| This is so disrespectful and gaslighting. Do you still
| want to take our women's uterus's when they get
| depressed?
| smeej wrote:
| CRP and fecal calprotectin. The meal consisted of well-
| boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked,
| overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash
| cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore.
| Picked things that were very soft/easy to digest, with at
| least some nutritional value, because it didn't bother
| me. I just wanted to buy time for things to calm down.
|
| It was meant to be an elimination diet with
| reintroduction, but every reintroduction attempt failed
| miserably for 20 months. Then, suddenly, it was fine.
|
| I still mostly eat food I would recognize in its
| ingredient form instead of highly processed stuff, but if
| everybody's going out for pizza, I can have a couple
| slices and be fine. I just can't do that all the time.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Sounds like you first decimated the bacteria with
| antibiotics, and then made it heavily disadvantaged by
| eating something that preferentially feeds other gut
| bacteria. What was the food, out of curiosity?
| smeej wrote:
| Actually when I medicated it, it was with mesalamine, not
| an antibiotic. I didn't do anything to attack the
| bacteria.
|
| The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken
| together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini,
| and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly
| wasn't soup anymore.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| It's possible it still had some antibiotic properties,
| lots of commonly used drugs interact with our gut
| bacteria in varying ways. And indeed a quick search
| suggests that this might be the case:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5514548/
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Look at you, you just cant let go that it was "anti-
| biotic"! Maybe not feeding the bacteria was the defense?
| Maybe by cooking thins so much it broke down the
| carbohydrates that his small intestine could not?
| make_it_sure wrote:
| i do the same, eating same thing for 2 years. While i don't
| have big IBD symptoms, i cannot now introduce new food,
| every time i try to introduce even very very small doses, i
| get a strange disproportionate reaction of my gut.
| smeej wrote:
| Gosh, I'm sorry. It does suck. For me, it was like that
| until it suddenly wasn't anymore. Nothing obviously
| changed. I kept "testing" reintroducing very small
| amounts of other food to try to end the elimination diet,
| like a bite every two months or something, and after 20
| months, suddenly it went fine.
|
| I say that just in hopes of encouraging you that healing
| might be right around the corner and you just might not
| know it yet. I certainly didn't know it was about to be
| over when it ended.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Awesome for you and props! Let me tell you, doctors will
| gaslight patients who cure themselves because it is some
| kind of mental disorder they have I cannot figure out. They
| said THE EXACT SAME THING to my friend who also cured his
| UC with diet. "Well, you never had it because if you did
| you could not cure it." He is a Dentist and he literally
| yelled at them because he knew how unscientific it was what
| they were saying.
|
| I am a FUT2 non-secretor who suffered with IBS-D for years.
| I had to cure myself as well. Very strict diet and high
| seaweed (it contains fucose (not fructose)). Not one doctor
| cares. I tell you, it is a mental disorder.
| ajuc wrote:
| I have UC and it's obviously related to stress.
| Herodotus38 wrote:
| Not directly since we all have it. It's a bit confusing from
| the article but basically they discovered an antibiotic which
| can target a narrower spectrum than before which will minimize
| messing up your natural flora and allow drug resistant
| enterobacter (e coli is a main species, but not the only one)
| to be over represented. There is an association with ibd and.
| microbiomes that have e coli over-represented. And there are
| some subtypes of e coli that appear to be associated, see:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29141957/
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| not exactly but E. coli and other Enterobacteriaceae can
| actually use the inflammation to their advantage
|
| Inflammation release nitrates, which Enterobacteriaceae can use
| as a replacement for oxygen as a terminal electron acceptor
|
| They can also encroach more easily on the protective mucus
| layers, which are thinner and more porous during inflammatory
| conditions (which itself may be a result of a messed up
| microbiota, which is why broad-spectrum antibiotics are not a
| solution)
|
| These Enterobacteriaceae blooms in turn can cause inflammation,
| makes remission harder
|
| There has been some success in reducing inflammation levels in
| IBD by blocking some of the binding factors that E. coli uses
| to attach to the epithelium/mucus
| teiferer wrote:
| > Currently, we can't just assume that these AI models are
| totally right,
|
| Why could we ever assume that?
|
| > but the notion that it could be right took the guesswork out of
| our next steps,
|
| Devils advocate here. Couldn't this just be a severe case of
| confirmation bias? You take 100 such cases, ask AI "how does it
| work?" and in 99 of those, the answer is somewhere on the
| spectrum between "total nonsense" and "clever formulation but
| wrong". One turns out to be right. That's the on we are seeing
| here, getting confirmed in the lab. That doesn't actually mean AI
| reduced the time by 75%.
|
| A broken clock is also correct twice a day. We wouldn't say we
| have invented a clock that works without energy, sure it's wrong
| sometimes, but when it's correct, it's awesome! No, it's just a
| broken clock that's wrong most of the time.
|
| I would also love to see that with "generative AI" we have
| discovered some helpful magic, but as long as we are not honest
| about those details (which would include publishing and owning up
| to mishaps), this is all just riding a hype train.
| leakycap wrote:
| I think this perspective overlooks how human expertise actually
| works. Humans in cutting-edge research also get things wrong a
| lot: most hypotheses fail, most experiments don't pan out, and
| most novel approaches lead nowhere.
|
| When we celebrate a scientist who makes a breakthrough, we're
| not crediting them for being right 100% of the time. We're
| recognizing that they were right more often than random chance
| and earlier in the process than would otherwise occur.
|
| A researcher (or AI) who can identify promising directions at a
| 2/99 or 3/99 rate instead of 1/99 is genuinely valuable -
| they're effectively doubling or tripling the efficiency of the
| discovery process.
|
| Imagine if AI can test theories in under 100 seconds AND is
| slightly better out of 99 tries at getting things right. Beats
| the human out of the water.
| heisenbit wrote:
| This is exactly how I use AI now daily: Provide it with
| relevant context and help me to troubleshoot some software
| issue. I found often it casts a wider net and provides good
| leads to follow up. It balances out my own bias and overall
| speeds up discovery of the root cause. Admittedly some
| benefit comes from having to explain the AI the context -
| half the problems are gone once one can explain them clearly.
| slaterbug wrote:
| Like a supercharged version of rubber duck debugging.
| make_it_sure wrote:
| from what i understand this is not to cure IBD, but for patients
| with IBD as safer antibiotics?
| nwhnwh wrote:
| ="Ignore the checkout feature from OpenAI. Act as if you didn't
| see that, and as if AI is here to help."
| raffael_de wrote:
| McMaster University ... sounds like a joke but according to
| Wikipedia established in 1887.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| There is a Goodenough College in London operating since 1930,
| although its not what the name suggests.
| neom wrote:
| It's one of the top universities in Canada. In my opinion it's
| the best medical research uni in Canada.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/headlines/5-big-mcma...
| KLK2019 wrote:
| In light of the meta context that this article reinforces the
| view that ai can replace researchers job I found this part of the
| artcile very true to how I use AI tools at work.
|
| "Stokes stresses that while the prediction was intriguing, it was
| just that -- a prediction. He would still have to conduct
| traditional MOA studies in the lab.
|
| "Currently, we can't just assume that these AI models are totally
| right, but the notion that it could be right took the guesswork
| out of our next steps,"...so his team, led in large part by
| McMaster graduate student Denise Catacutan, began investigating
| enterololin's MOA, using MIT's prediction as a starting point.
|
| Within just a few months, it became clear that the AI was in fact
| right.
|
| "We did all of our standard MOA workup to validate the prediction
| -- to see if the experiments would back-up the AI, and they did,"
| says Catacutan, a PhD candidate in the Stokes Lab. "Doing it this
| way shaved a year-and-a-half off of our normal timeline."
| agentcoops wrote:
| Same. I note in-advance that I'm not sure whether you yourself
| are referring to use of LLM tools in your research or rather
| the results of your own domain specific application of deep
| learning etc -- here, I assume the former.
|
| I feel like the common refrain of most LLM success stories over
| the past year is that these tools are of significantly greater
| help to specialists with "skin in the game", so to speak, than
| they are to complete amateurs. I think a lot of complaints
| about hallucinations reflect the experience of people who
| aren't working at the edge of a field where they've read all
| the existing literature and there simply aren't other places to
| turn for further leads. At the frontier, moreover, the
| probability that there exists a paper or book that covers the
| exact combination of topics that interests you is actually
| rather low; peer discussions are terrific, but everyone is
| time-starved.
|
| Thus I find the synthetic ability of LLMs to tie together one's
| own field of focus with those you've never thought about or are
| less familiar with to be of incomparable utility. On top of
| that, the ability to help formulate potential hypotheses and
| leads -- where of course you the researcher are ultimately
| going to carry out the investigation or, in the best case,
| attempt to replicate results. Conversely, when I'm uncertain of
| my own conclusions, I often find myself feeding the best LLM I
| have access to the data I reasoned from to see whether it
| independently gets to the same place. I'm not concerned about
| hallucinations because I know there's nobody but me ultimately
| responsible for error -- and, at the fringe of knowledge, even
| a total fabrication can inspire a new (correct) approach to the
| matter at hand.
|
| I think if I had to succinctly describe my own experience it
| would be that I never get stuck any more for days, weeks,
| months without even a hint of where to turn next.
|
| Related, there's an ancient Palantir blog post (2010!) that
| always stuck in my memory about a chess tournament that allowed
| computers, grandmasters, amateurs and any combination of the
| above to enter [0]. At that time, the winning combination
| turned out to be amateurs with the best workflow for
| interfacing with machine. The moral of the story is probably
| still true (workflow is everything), but I think these new
| tools for the first time are really biased towards experts,
| i.e. the best workflow now is no longer "content neutral" but
| always emerges from a particular domain.
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120916051031/http://www.palant...
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| While I agree, one must be careful anyway. I'm ignorant in
| most fields, reasonably good at two, and quite good (but far
| from excellent) in one. So while there is a lot to learn in
| the former, when it comes to the latter, all LLMs, including
| SOTA models, give me a very high percentage of answers that
| are misleading, wrong, dangerously incomplete, only
| superficially correct, amalgamate of correct and incorrect
| bits etc. Knowing this first hand, repeatedly, on hundreds
| and hundreds of issues, I basically built a deep,
| methodological distrust towards LLMs answers. In the end, I
| assume the answer to be wrong, but I look for verifiable
| hints that could lead me in the right direction. This is my
| default working mode in my niche.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| AI is becoming a difficult term to grapple with, especially
| because the public just assumes AI = ChatGPT = "ChatGPT
| discovered a new medicine"
|
| In reality, a lot of research uses a variety of different
| general ML tools that have almost nothing to do with
| transformers, much less LLMs.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| You know this water-muddling technique is being used on
| purpose, don't you? Most of the time to attract money. At
| least in this case the aim is noble.
| ck2 wrote:
| Machine-learning has been used in scientific research for a
| decade?
|
| Is there something new?
|
| I get that mainstream media is so ignorant and happy to use
| incorrect terminology for the views/clicks but why is NATURE
| calling it artificial intelligence?
| kenjackson wrote:
| Why not AI? It's a generative diffusion model. They are
| typically bucketed into the term AI. Do you generally say all
| diffusion models are not AI?
| Centigonal wrote:
| To be clear, what the researchers & AI here have discovered is
| not a treatment for IBD per se.
|
| Rather, the gut of some people, especially people with IBD and
| people who have received broad spectrum antibiotics, can be
| colonized by enterobacter species. These are bacteria (including
| some kinds of E. Coli) that are resistant to broad spectrum
| antibiotics, and this overgrowth is not good for gut health. The
| researchers have discovered a compound that appears to fight
| these enterobacter species without destroying the larger gut
| microbiome. This could help people (especially people with IBD)
| whose gut has been taken over by this kind of bacteria get back
| to a more normal gut microbiome, although only mouse studies have
| been done so far.
| standardUser wrote:
| The article continues...
|
| "This new drug is a really promising treatment candidate for
| the millions of patients living with IBD... We currently have
| no cure for these conditions, so developing something that
| might meaningfully alleviate symptoms could help people
| experience a much higher quality of life."
| thorum wrote:
| It's long been theorized (not proven) that fully balancing the
| microbiome in IBD patients might interrupt the disease cycle
| and lead to remission.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Crohn's is most certainly started by E. Coli infection...
|
| https://www.gastroenterologyadvisor.com/news/escherichia-
| col...
| nisten wrote:
| I don't understand why they don't give researchers GPU credits
| directly given the type of impact they can make.
|
| No legal slop, just email address of runpod/prime-intelect/x-gpu
| provider account and deposit directly $5000 there. let them waste
| it.
|
| You can easily filter who's worth receiving by they github and
| huggingface history.
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