Kyle Munkittrick

bioethics. product. healthcare.

opinions own

[Jake Eaton @jkeatn]

for the past few weeks, I’ve been exploring painting with Fable 5.2 in code. one of the most common critiques I heard about Opus 5.5’s paintings was that it was only emulating real art. I thought that was fair, so i’ve been asking Fable 5.2 to develop personas—artists with some sort of a back story and a consistent style roughly identifiable in time

not knowing what to expect, i’ve watched this project evolve in directions i never predicted. I give comments or steers, and Claude updates or revises the engines that power the brushes and paint. where paintings come up i like or find intriguing, i ask it to go deeper. these are some favorites.

each of these is a python program, some one to two thousand lines of code, that places every stroke through a simulated paint engine with different bristles. most take a few thousand strokes, but i’ve pushed much higher with varying results. Claude does not use an image model, nor render or trace in advance

[Christina Farr @chrissyfarr]

Healthcare literally has no choice but to figure out AI.

- We have an aging population with more care needs, AND a provider shortage.
- That leads to wage inflation.
- At a time where we are already bearing double digit medical trend cost increases

No choice.

[Emma Camp @emmma_camp_]

In 1910, the infant mortality rate was 10% and life expectancy was in the 50s.

I'm so sick of this braindead nonsense.

[Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok]

We still don’t understand how anesthesia works but you can be damn sure I want it when it comes to surgery.

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

This is a slide from Terence Tao's 'Math 2.0' public lecture yesterday evening at Caltech. I am highly confident that, if the cure actually worked, almost any Stage 4 cancer patient would tell you that human comprehension of its mechanism is completely irrelevant to them.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

@Noahpinion Very bizarre sentence, very high memeability. May we all look forward to the day when the American Society of Clinical Oncology publishes its own stricken open letter: “America’s cancer scientists did not ask for this work to be done.”

[Jake Eaton @jkeatn]

for the past few months i've been asking our models to paint. opus 5.5 is very skilled at emulating different styles

every image here is a python program generated pixel by pixel. there is no image model, and no off-the-shelf art software. instead, it's about 7,500 lines of code using standard libraries to emulate different brush styles. the agents don't use any pictures as reference, instead working only from what they know about each painter

[Jack Clark @jackclarkSF]

"stochastic parrot" was a mimetically-fit cognitive virus that spread from 2021-2025; it temporarily blinded many gifted people to the nature of AI progress, burning up crucial years in which they could have helped think through the response to the situation.

[roon @tszzl]

for the skeptics in government and elsewhere: “pacing the frontier” will compress the margins of the frontier labs. it is a heavy cost imposed asymmetrically on model developers with the strongest AIs in America. by its nature, it would be a terrible regulatory capture tactic

[Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok]

Speaking as head of the Center for Study of Public Choice, the capture story for an AI pause doesn't fit. Reg capture is what you attempt when you're losing. Anthropic is about to have the biggest IPO in history. Winners don't lobby for regulation.

[Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei]

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.

Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.

You can read the full post here: https://t.co/OGyPb7yaYt

[Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTeslo]

Last week, when Anthropic announced the binder design news, I said the exciting part isn't binder design, but the orchestration of models to produce a research assistant - like entity. This is quite cool and it seems Anthropic is continuing down this road of scientific automation.

So what's happening?

They propose the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), which is a common standard that lets AI agents safely connect to and control physical scientific and industrial equipment. This would include things such as microscopes, liquid handlers, lasers and manufacturing machinery.

Today, integrating different pieces of hardware can take weeks or months because each device has its own interface and often requires custom software -- which is extremely annoying. MHS aims to reduce that setup to hours by giving devices a standardized software “driver” and a common way to communicate with AI agents.

The blog post gives one example, which involves Claude learning to align a laser. Claude adjusted the laser, then observed the result through a camera, then repeated the process to understand the system and finally, it wrote a script that could perform the alignment automatically.

I think this line of scientific automation
is actually much more exciting and higher yield potentially than all the stuff that aims more at making specific scientific discoveries (eg using AI to improve binder design). I think it's underrated how much boring friction slows down biological research, and it's exciting to potentially reduce that.

Of course, it also seems like being along the path to full scientific automation (including of human scientists) -- though still very early (and potentially it will never happen). I feel much more conflicted about that; I was just debating with some friends about this.

In my mind, scientific discovery is an expression of something very core to the human spirit -- a sort of fundamental curiosity. And I'd be sad if that ceased to be an activity humans were involved in.

[Jake Eaton @jkeatn]

this video has been circulating within Anthropic like DFW's samizdat because there is a moment in which everyone watching it reliably starts crying tears of joy and wonder. i've seen it a dozen times now and it still works every time

[YIMBYLAND @YIMBYLAND]

Ironically, the anti data center people will be the reason you get cancer, not the “toxic” data centers.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Many drugs work by binding to a specific target in the body and blocking or changing what it does. An important first step in the drug development process is designing a molecule that can bind tightly to its target. Traditionally, that's meant weeks or months of expert work per target, sifting through a large number of candidates to identify the few that work.

We wanted to test if Claude could successfully design novel protein binders from scratch (also called de novo design). With a protein design prompt written by a human expert, Claude autonomously designed protein binders against 14 out of 15 targets.

We then worked with Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience, who independently built and tested the proteins Claude designed.

[Zeke Emanuel @ZekeEmanuel]

AI alone will provide better medical care than physicians, or even physicians working with AI.

AI will likely be ready to be deployed for real-world cognitive medical tasks in some, maybe many, workflows by 2030. Now is the time for leadership to develop workflows and regulation.

Read more in @JAMA_current with @vkhosla, @nealkhosla, and @AbeBakerButler.

https://t.co/D8fX5wqkue

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

It’s easy to hate insurance companies if if you want to make medical care cheaper and more widely available you need the courage to hate health care providers.

https://t.co/R5ITj92ndK

[Kyle Munkittrick @PopBioethics]

Thankful for Bilal! SF should be 7x7x7

[Bilal Mahmood 馬百樂 @bilalmahmood]

Why is this photo so maddening?

Because it exposes the generational divide in our housing debate. Between those who find a reason to say no - instead of yes - to housing.

Over the last year on the Board of Supervisors, I've seen NIMBYs say no to housing because it's not affordable enough (eventhough it could include nearly 100 affordable units), because it will change neighborhood character (even if its just on an empty parking lot), or because it casts a shadow (serious! though I do have a law to fix that)

We have a deep affordability crisis right now, and younger generations are calling BS now both on NIMBYs who will find any excuse to oppose housing, as wells as on our city's lack of action. We have been doing just the amount necessary to be in compliance with the law, but not the amount sufficient to actually break ground on new housing.

In a 7x7 city, we must build housing wherever we can, faster and bolder, if we are to live up to our values as a progressive San Francisco that can continue to be a home for the immigrants and refugees who seek to move here as much as it can be home for the children and grandchildren who seek to stay.

[Mission Local @MLNow]

There's lots of renewed online chatter about the Marina Safeway housing proposal after a neighborhood meeting last night.

Reminder: We asked every San Francisco politician about their stance on it. Here's what they said.

https://t.co/vqgNiUNDjO

[Marie Gluesenkamp Perez @MGPforCongress]

Fighting gerontocracy with democracy.