Look, I’ve been around long enough to know that when someone promises eternal youth, they’re usually trying to sell you something. Snake oil salesmen have just traded their wagons for MacBooks, but the song remains the same. Now OpenAI wants to teach old cells new tricks, and they’re bringing their fancy language models to the longevity party.
Let me break this down while I pour myself another bourbon. OpenAI’s latest party trick is something called GPT-4b micro, a “small language model” that’s supposedly cracking the code on cellular rejuvenation. They’re messing with these things called Yamanaka factors - proteins that can theoretically turn back the biological clock on cells. And the funny part? These proteins are described as “unusually floppy and unstructured,” which reminds me of myself at closing time.
The real kicker here is that current cell reprogramming is about as efficient as my attempts at sobriety - less than 1% success rate. But OpenAI claims they’ve made these proteins work 50 times better. That’s like turning a dive bar into a five-star restaurant just by rearranging the bar stools.
Here’s where it gets interesting, and I mean actually interesting, not just whiskey-interesting. Unlike Google’s AlphaFold, which predicts protein shapes like some molecular fortune teller, OpenAI took a different approach. They trained their model on protein sequences from various species, kind of like creating a universal translator for the language of life itself. And they did it with way less data than their chatbot cousins, which is like writing a novel using only the words you’d find in a bar’s bathroom graffiti.
John Hallman, one of OpenAI’s researchers, says their proteins are “better than what scientists were able to produce by themselves.” Well, John, I’ve been told my writing is better after a few drinks, but that doesn’t make it true.
The whole thing reminds me of those late-night infomercials promising miracle cures, except this time it’s wearing a lab coat and speaking in Python. They’re “serious about contributing to science,” they say, but they’re keeping the model locked up tighter than my liquor cabinet when my ex comes to visit.
And here’s the truth bomb that nobody seems to want to acknowledge: we don’t even know if this works yet. The results haven’t been published, and the model isn’t available for anyone else to try. It’s like bragging about having the world’s best chili recipe but refusing to let anyone taste it.
The way they’re using this “few-shot” method to prompt the model is particularly amusing. It’s basically like teaching someone to dance by showing them a few moves and hoping they don’t step on anyone’s toes. Except in this case, we’re talking about potentially reprogramming the fundamental building blocks of life itself. No pressure, right?
What really gets me is the casual way they’re approaching this whole thing. “Whether those capabilities will come out to the world as a separate model or whether they’ll be rolled into our mainline reasoning models - that’s still to be determined,” says Jaech. Translation: “We might have found the fountain of youth, but we’re still deciding whether to put it in the water supply or sell it as premium bottled water.”
Let’s be real here - this could be groundbreaking stuff. But it could also be another case of AI companies throwing computational spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. The difference is, this time they’re throwing it at our biological wall, and that’s a wall I’d prefer to keep clean, thank you very much.
Until we see some peer-reviewed results and independent verification, I’m filing this under “interesting but probably oversold,” right next to cryptocurrency and my plans to start jogging. The promise of eternal youth is as old as humanity itself, and while AI might eventually crack that code, I’m not holding my breath. Though that might just be the cigarettes talking.
For now, I’ll stick to my tried-and-true method of preserving myself: pickling from the inside out. At least that way, I know exactly what I’m getting into.
Time to close the laptop and open another bottle. Tomorrow’s another day of tech promises and human skepticism.
Yours truly from the bottom of the glass, Henry Chinaski
P.S. If anyone from OpenAI is reading this, I volunteer as tribute for your longevity experiments. Just make sure the treatment includes bourbon.
Source: OpenAI has created an AI model for longevity science