this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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No money in curing cancer with an LLM. Heaps of money taking advantage if increasingly alienated and repressed people.
There's loads of money in curing cancer. For one you can sell the cure for cancer to people with cancer.
That's a weird take! It makes much more ~~money~~ sense to sell long term ~~subscriptions~~ treatments, rather than a one time cure.
/s off course
You could sell the cure for a fortune. Imagine something that can reliably cure late stage cancers. You could charge a million for the treatment, easily.
Yes, selling the actual cure would be profitable...but an LLM would only ever provide the text for synthesizing it but none of the extensive testing, licensing, or manufacturing, etc.. An existing pharmaceutical company would have to believe the LLM and then front the costs for the development, testing, and manufacture...which constitutes a large proportion of the costs of bringing a treatment to market. Burning compute time on that is a waste of resources, especially when fleecing horny losers is available right now. It is just business.
and LLMs hallucinate a lot of shit they "know" nothing about. a big pharma company spending millions of dollars on an LLM hallucination would crack me the fuck up were it not such a serious disease.
Right, that is why I originally said there is no money in a cancer cure invented by LLM. It's just not a serious possibility.
What a weird take, research use AI already? Some researchers even research things that, gasp, is not monetiseable right away!
I used to work in academic physics, and I currently work in data science. I am deeply familiar with both ends of the subject in question. LLMs are useful research tools because they speed up the reference finding and literature review process, not because they synthesize new information that does not need to be independently verified.
In the context of medical research, they could absolutely use LLMs to facilitate a literature search. What LLMs cannot do is hand researchers a proposed cure that they could sell to people. You still need to do the leg work of synthesizing the molecules, standardizing the process, industrializing it, patenting it, multiple rounds of testing on increasingly complex animals and eventually people, and then going through the drug approval process with the FDA and others. LLMs speed up the CHEAPEST and EASIEST part of the research process. That is why LLMs will not be handing us the cure for cancer.