AI will not suddenly lead to an Alzheimer's cure

Jacob Trefethen · 2 Aug 2025

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AI will not on its own compress decades of medical progress into a few years, because the binding constraint is human data, clinical trials and regulation rather than intelligence.

Their wordsThose are why I do not believe that AI could end disease within 10 years on its own, nor that 50-100 years of medical progress could occur 5-10 years after powerful AI due to AI progress alone

Also said by Ruxandra Teslo

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5 korrents from this piece ↓

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
AI will not on its own compress decades of medical progress into a few years, because the binding constraint is human data, clinical trials and regulation rather than intelligence.
Mental modelBottlenecks

Their wordsThose are why I do not believe that AI could end disease within 10 years on its own, nor that 50-100 years of medical progress could occur 5-10 years after powerful AI due to AI progress alone
Our reading
Going all in on AI is not the highest-return strategy for human flourishing, even if AI does produce rapid scientific advances.

Their wordsGoing all in on AI is not the highest return-on-investment strategy if you care about human flourishing, even if AI might lead to rapid scientific advances.
Our reading
Fifty years on, monoclonal antibodies still cannot be manufactured cheaply enough to use them for obvious jobs like preventing malaria in children.

Their wordsYet the production methods still can’t make them below $10 per gram, so they’re still not cheap enough for some “obvious” applications like preventing kids getting malaria in a rainy season.
Our reading
Because research is concentrated in rich countries, both what we know and what gets made are skewed away from the diseases of poor ones.

Their wordsResearch predominance in rich countries leads to skewed knowledge and product availability.
Our reading
Some diseases are technologically solved and still spread, because the remaining bottleneck is trust rather than science.
Mental modelBottlenecks

Their wordsMeasles is technologically “solved”, but not everyone trusts the solutions or their messengers.

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