Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently posted on X, “[S]aying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive.” He conceded that “we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.” He’s right.
While the invention of useful AI tools has dramatically elevated scientists’ confidence that they’ll eventually find cures, the task is daunting. The number of plausible new biological molecules is greater than the quantity of water molecules in the world’s oceans. As large and powerful as current gigawatt-scale AI data centers are, the challenge of speeding up discovery is so monumental that it invokes the classic movie line, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”
