Claude Comes for Science
Sometimes, holding a mirror up to this insanity is more than sufficient
Yesterday, Anthropic announced its LLM named Claude is coming for the life sciences. They are not the first, with Sam Altman taking rather clumsy aim in July. Of course, Consensus, OpenEvidence, and others are working hard to bring LLMs to what they view as a lucrative space with massive social leverage. There is no more direct path to being able to feel like you control the truth.
But as Ed Zitron said about Altman’s word salad:
. . . it’s time to stop idolizing these speciously-informed goobers. . . .
It’s tempting to believe that there is some sort of intellectual barrier between you and the powerful — that the confusing and obtuse way that they speak is the sound of genius, rather than somebody who has learned a lot of smart-sounding words without ever learning what they mean.I could write a lot of words about this, but instead, I’m just going to hold up a mirror so you can see some of the more ludicrous parts of what’s going on here.
Yesterday, Zitron also broke a story strongly suggesting that Anthropic’s cloud costs scale 100% with revenues, giving them no path to profitability.
What are these math-challenged technologists doing in science? I could write a lot of words, but let’s just hold up a mirror to their announcement for now.