No, Dario Amodei, we will not be curing cancer and “most human disease” in five to ten years

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• Gary Marcus strongly refutes Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s claim that AI will cure “most human disease,” including cancer, in 5-10 years, calling the timeline “naive as to be absurd” and “magical thinking.”
• Experts cited by Marcus emphasize that medical science is profoundly complex, with “cancer not one disease” but over 200 distinct conditions, and drug development requires extensive, time-consuming preclinical and clinical work and FDA approval that current AI cannot bypass.
• Many respected professionals, including pro-AI physician Eric Topol and computational biologist Keith Robison, universally dismiss Amodei’s projections as “wildly off-base and impossible,” noting that AI currently lacks the “causal understanding” for such breakthroughs.
• Marcus warns that such exaggerated claims give “unrealistic hope” and are “very cruel for patients to be misled,” suggesting AI leaders need to better calibrate their understanding of medicine’s challenges.