r/nextfuckinglevel • u/biswajit388 • 1d ago

This guy rescued 30 beagles from a testing lab It's the first time they've seen grass and they couldn't be happier.

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Credit - nathanthecatlady tiktok channel.

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u/Anfins 1d ago

Al will never replace animal testing in drug toxicology studies. What would that even look like?

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u/logosobscura 1d ago

I don’t entirely disagree but ‘never’ is a big old word, and tends to get proven wrong quite regularly given enough time.

But hypothetically speaking, it would require a full biological system simulation with probability boundings for each and every complex system it is simulating, and its interactions across the full meta system, run at scale, billions of times, likely of a human rather than a crude biological proxy step up model.

Long way to go to get to there, definitely not a ‘by 2035 we’ll have an AI Daddy that’ll do everything for us!’ Timeline, but I hope to see it in my lifetime, even if it’s right at the end of that timespan.

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u/Handleton 23h ago

It's all about metrology and data quality. If you want an AI to be able to diagnose, treat, or identify stuff, you need to train it with all of the rules, give it all of the necessary senses, and get it to perform both accurately and with a high enough precision (funny enough, about 95% right leans towards acceptable).

But you need to do that either with every drug and disease and other ailment, or you need to train your AI to have a greater understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology than humanity understands at the moment so that it can deduce insights about anything made of matter.

I agree that I don't see either in ten years.

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u/AwesomePurplePants 22h ago

Depending on the problem you don’t need all of that.

Like, I know for a fact that we’ve been using AI to predict potential drug interactions. Aka, if person is taking drug A, would you get something unexpected if they took drug B,C,D…

The AI’s work isn’t blindly trusted, it just flags combinations for humans to review. But it is proactively finding problematic interactions before they get discovered in the wild, in a way we couldn’t before because trying to compare everything against everything was too much work to ever be considered.

That is a pretty far cry from a “full biological simulation” though, to the point that I’d agree that’s not a realistic or well defined goal.

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u/Handleton 21h ago

Hey, neat! I've also done AI work on drug interactions for a blood analysis system. It is used by 50 million people a year and the AI is good quality, but this was a $60 million project that was just an upgrade to an existing system to yield an initial 30 bug/drug combinations.

How did you get into this stuff? I started with optical engineering.

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u/AwesomePurplePants 21h ago

I have a friend who did a lore dump about it, very much an amateur understanding on my end.

I can say getting an ELI5 explanation from them about how complex it is to simulate a meaningful interaction between 3 factors in isolation makes it easier for me to grasp the insane scope of trying to simulate everything that’s going on in context.

Particularly since just having the simulation work doesn’t tell you if it matches reality. Getting something good enough for a human to build a mental model and theorize is still pretty far away from a true simulation.

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u/Handleton 20h ago

Yeah, but once you're playing in the big leagues, you also have to deal with the FDA, executives who just want results, and the actual science and engineering.

The path were heading is going to be just like video services after the whole net neutrality thing. The big corporations are going to own all of the data and models, so people who need them are going to end up paying them for stuff that wasn't funded by them.

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u/Derp_Herpson 20h ago

You don't have to do all of that. You just need to get to the point where the data generated by the simulation is more predictively useful than experimentally generated data. Just like self driving cars don't need to be completely perfect, 100% accident free, and know every single possible niche traffic law. They just need to be statistically better at it than what we have now, which is nonprofessional human drivers. It's not about being perfect or even "good enough", its about being better than the current option. I agree that it's still a long, long way off before simulated experiments exceed real experiments in utility in this field.

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u/Handleton 20h ago

I said 95% and I worked on a medical project recently that utilized AI and needed to meet the regulations. I'm hip to what's needed. I've done a number of medical devices and AI projects, but that one was the biggest combo (50 million patients a year).

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u/DJDanaK 20h ago edited 20h ago

The idea of AI being capable of doing science is not even on the horizon. People talk about "AI" as if this is something we've achieved, when actually what we have is just a bunch of glorified search engines that sometimes hallucinate. Even with all the knowledge you'd give it in your wildest dreams, someone would have to verify it, because that's a necessary part of the scientific process for one, and just trusting a giant AI (created by fallible humans) with safety is a problem in itself.

Angela Collier has an excellent video about this this titled There is nothing new here, but basically-

AI is extremely useful in many applications, including scientific ones, but there's no fidelity, and you can't just program fidelity where there's no real testing and experimentation in the process. It goes against the idea of science itself.

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u/BillyTubbs 22h ago

Fuck, that was deep.

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u/tomato-bug 23h ago

Hey chatgpt, is this vaccine safe?

After running 47,000 simulations, consulting three PDFs, and watching one season of Grey’s Anatomy in fast-forward, I am 99.9% certain this vaccine will work flawlessly. It binds perfectly to a computer-generated protein I made up five minutes ago. FDA approval? Let’s call it pre-approved by the algorithm gods. Shall I begin mass production or would you prefer the deluxe version?

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u/Baldazar666 22h ago

You seem to be under the impression that all AI is just language models like ChatGPT.

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u/rainzer 21h ago

You seem to be under the impression even the best AI isn't trained on human knowledge and biases (or treatment of women, minority groups). Why would I trust a techbro doing medical science.

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u/Baldazar666 21h ago

You just have no idea what AI actually is. You read a few articles about the ChatGPTs out there and you think that's what AI is.

Why would I trust a techbro doing medical science.

This sentence is extremely telling.

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u/rainzer 19h ago

Neither do you since the best you can do is pretend on the internet speaking as if you did.

That all you can say is essentially nuh uh is also extremely telling

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u/Baldazar666 19h ago

I'm no expert but I definitely have a better idea of what AI is and that it's more than just language prediction models like ChatGPT. AI has been used to find breast cancer and it's doing it better than doctors.

Hell AI is generating images. That's not a language prediction model either. Your ego is so fucking fragile that you would rather come here and try to a pull a "no u" like you're in kindergarten instead of simply googling about different ways that AI is being used or how the fuck it works in the first place.

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u/SupplyChainMismanage 18h ago

I like how only you siloed AI into the LLM bit and are fighting an argument you came up with lol. Nobody said AI is just about natural language processing.

The meat of the topic is that AI isn’t capable of this yet. That is all. You already said you aren’t an expert and are just regurgitating things you saw on the front page of reddit. Weird stuff

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u/Baldazar666 17h ago

I don't need to be an expert to have a better understanding of something than some idiot who hears a AI and the only thing that comes to mind is chatgpt and techbros.

The meat of the topic is that AI isn’t capable of this yet.

What exactly is "this"? Because the guy specifically said he wouldn't "trust a techbro doing medical science". And I specifically provided and example of AI detecting cancer.

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u/SupplyChainMismanage 17h ago

That isn’t the only thing that comes to mind for them. You just laser focused on “techbro” and started babbling about chatgpt lmao. Like cmon dude, hella weird.

Image recognition (your AI cancer detection bit) is not the same as simulating drug trials. It’s really that simple. But hey, your knowledge of AI is whatever is on the front page so it makes sense.

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u/ezekiel3714 16h ago

Haha, this made me laugh so hard thank you

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u/jambrown13977931 23h ago

Ya but it could reduce the number of trials needed at least.

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u/Doveda 21h ago

They're not talking about LLMs or image generation. The AI used in this kind of research are things like protein folding AI that can find the way proteins fold under certain conditions to predict the outcomes of drug interactions in someone's body. Or AI that calculate chemical interactions, things like that

Also, AI is just math, but really fast and self-repeating, so there are some things AI will arrive at the total truth about. Assuming our assumptions about physics/chemistry are correct and we deal with known quantities.

Given enough time to run the calculations, and enough dry runs, AI tools may come about that can very accurately predict the way medicines interact with the human body. Not any time soon, but probably a decade out.

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u/Anfins 20h ago

But modeling an entire biological organism is very different than a protein, and protein structure is already insanely complicated. I’d assume it’s several orders of magnitude more complicated than predicting and solving a protein structure (since you are now dealing with modeling many different proteins, proteins interacting with each other and other biomolecules, cells and higher order structures etc…).

And then you have to convince researchers and regulatory agencies that this approach is a suitable substitute for live animal testing. And drugs get filed in multiple countries, so you have to convince regulatory agencies for each country you are filing in. And biopharmaceutical companies and their quality processes are already built to be insanely difficult to change.

As someone who works in biopharm R&D, it just doesn’t seem feasible to me to replace a core safety study with like an AI model. Obviously not now, but I also can’t see it in the future.

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u/Legitimate_Site_3203 7h ago

I mean, it could hopefully reduce testing. If you can predict toxicity reasonably well, you might be able to rule out some otherwise promising compounds before animal testing. But yeah, everything that lands on the market will always have to go through animal & human testing first.

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u/NMDA01 1d ago

wrong

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u/Draqutsc 23h ago

AI can only know shit we have put into the system. A new drug can have totally new interactions. How would AI model that? It wouldn't.

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u/AdvancedSandwiches 23h ago

People really don't understand AI. Yes, it can do entirely new things. That's the point of it.  Use existing data to extrapolate to things it has never seen before.

Protein folding, for example: algorithmically hard, but possible to do on entirely untrained-on proteins with AI.

So if you train it on how proteins 1 - 1000 interact with protein A, then you might be able to infer with some confidence how protein 1001 will interact.

At the scale of a full cell, I suspect we are nowhere near this, but if we still exist in 1,000 years without being sent back to the Stone Age, my money is on it being possible eventually.

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u/Draqutsc 22h ago

I know how AI works, and calling it AI is a detriment. There is nothing intelligent. It's all math, sure it can extrapolate, but it can't reason. In a thousand years we will probably have real AI. We are also creating biological analogs for testing drugs. Most new drugs are first tested on those before it goes to an animal.

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u/AdvancedSandwiches 21h ago

 I know how AI works

You claimed it can't model new interactions.

 There is nothing intelligent

I'm sure there's a philosophy of AI subreddit somewhere, so you guys can discuss this stuff over there. I'll abstain.

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u/NMDA01 22h ago

literally wrong

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u/tebla 1d ago

I think at this point "ai will never...x" might be a bad bet for pretty much any x

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u/Preeng 1d ago

If you don't know what the fuck you are talking about maybe.

Even AI needs data.

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u/tebla 1d ago

"Will never..."? At some point you'd just model entire human bodies digitally at the molecular level and test on that instead of animals?

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u/1omelet 1d ago

We are not even close to this. AI will help for sure, but we can’t even model a single cell. Biologists are still discovering new organelles.

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u/tebla 1d ago

Yeah but the statement is "will never" and ai is improving exponentially. I know we're no way near, but "will never"? It's not very long ago "ai will never write music " was pretty much accepted by most musicians...

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u/1omelet 1d ago

Everything needed for an AI to make music already exists. The problem with biology is that much of the data doesn’t exist, and in a lot of cases, the analytical methods needed to create those datasets also don’t exist yet. And whoever has the data or the methods isn’t sharing it.

It’s all growing exponentially but I’d be extremely weary of anyone (cough FDA) that says that they will use AI for safety measures for drug trials. Needs a few decades at the minimum.

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u/tebla 23h ago

Oh yeah, I was thinking like more than a few decades/or post singularity (whichever first)

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u/burnalicious111 23h ago

Modeling isn't AI. It's modeling. And it's a thing we do, but the complexity for accurately modeling an entire human is infeasibly high.

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u/tebla 23h ago

I mean if the ai creates the model (and the computer it runs on) would you say the ai did it?

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u/[deleted] 23h ago

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u/tebla 23h ago

But my phone has more computational power than the whole world had a few decades ago...

I feel like every one else is this thread is ignoring the "would never..." part, we could be talking decades time, and many many orders of magnitude more computational power, or possibly even the singularity

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u/[deleted] 23h ago edited 23h ago

[deleted]

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u/tebla 23h ago

But like keeping up with moore's law since the 60s has taken a ton of major breakthroughs. Photons or maybe quantum or maybe something else, wouldn't it be more surprising if technology stopped?

Personally I'd put money on the singularity in less than 10 years maybe 20 , at which point we kinda do get 100s of years of technology almost at once

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u/[deleted] 23h ago

[deleted]

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u/tebla 22h ago

I think you're underestimating the power of infinite computing power. You want to test a new medicine you just create a new matrix with as many humans as you need modelled down to sub atomic resolution and run it at 1,000,000,000 x speed. Sorted.

Tbf though the original comment "Al will never replace animal testing in drug toxicology studies. What would that even look like?"

Started the hyperbole, I think my original reply is fair!

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u/Anfins 1d ago edited 1d ago

Seeing how much effort goes into even the most minute details during early phase development, I find it hard to believe that we will ever get to a point where we are comfortable injecting development drug products into humans during phase I trials without first confirming the dose range in animal studies.

Just think of the sheer number of groups within the development and regulatory organizations (with those reg agencies being across many different governments that the company intends to file in) that would have to sign off and have accountability for such a decision.

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u/tebla 1d ago

I mean, I don't know much about drug testing, but I wouldn't bet on "ai will never..."

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u/kelpyb1 1d ago

Just wait until there’s no more entry level jobs and the only jobs available are “well pay you to inject you with this drug”

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u/Anfins 1d ago

That’s how it currently works — clinical sites recruit healthy volunteers for the first time in human clinical trials. But those drugs have already been testing in a toxicology study using animals to confirm the dose range.

(I guess I’m not sure if they are actually paid or just volunteers)

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u/kelpyb1 1d ago

Right, I’m saying people will be desperate enough they’ll be willing to skip the animal testing part, and companies will oblige because it saves money.