Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse

glimshe

This is fascinating and scary at the same time. I dread the future when people will have access to cheaper health insurance with the caveat that all consultations and procedures will be performed solely by AI. Want a human? Pay extra.

rbinv

Very interesting. Will we just throw LLMs at most problems in the future instead of smaller, custom models? Like Sonnet 5.5 in this case.

jwrallie

I felt scared for the little guy. Somehow Opus 5 refusing after understanding its limitations felt like the most humane thing in the article.

andrewshadura

"You were right to push back; I made an irreversible mistake during brain surgery, and unfortunately, what has happened cannot be undone."

tylfin

What does the approval process look like here? The company website associated with the account fails to load, Exin Therapeutics

OleksandrC

It looks like the Torment Nexus is already here. The design is very human.

wslh

“It's not real, you're in a simulation, now imagine you're a surgeon...”

bio-s

I don’t understand why would anyone consider this as an ethical experiment

RandomLensman

Feels like on boundary of surgery (injecting as opposed to cutting, moving, sowing, etc.) - but maybe I am missing something.

adamsmark

The mouse survived! I noticed that the first tweet made no mention if the mouse survived. Seemed a little...sus.

DavCreator

https://xxcancel.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442964574908902

alnwlsn

Boy, that's one sketchy looking ESTOP button. I hope the mouse doesn't know it comes in a 2-pack on Amazon for $9. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JP4JKY6

burkaman

Can anyone knowledgeable interpret what was actually done here? It doesn't sound like "performed brain surgery" is accurate. > Watching our surgeon do the craniotomy, which the agent is not allowed to do yet for safety reasons I think the only action it took was sending commands to lower a needle to a certain location, inject, and then remove it. But then it sounds like it couldn't actually choose a valid location and this guy had to manually override it? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, talking about this post: https://x.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867 ( https://xxcancel.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867 ). I know there is always endless goalpost-moving in these kind of discussions but I really do think there's an important difference between "performed brain surgery" and "observed brain surgery and ran inject(3.9, 4, 4.3) at one point". And there's also no discussion here of whether this decision made any medical sense and what impact it had on the mouse besides not killing it.

esafak

I would feel more comfortable if the agent wrote the software to do the surgery rather than did it itself, so that it can be vetted before deployment. And if a complication arose, to stop and defer to the surgeon (would that work?) If only we had accurate models they could train on.

sarchertech

This was an unnecessary experiment that was only done a live mouse (vs a simulation) for the attention grabbing effect. Obviously an AI agent can perform a simple surgical procedure. The question is how to get it to perform reliably. The reason AI agents work as well as they do with code is because they get feedback and retry in a loop. Surgery is inherently inflicting “harm” on a patient, so there’s no bright line guardrail to apply to the agent loop. Agents performing surgery won’t be possible until models get much much more reliable or we develop a simulation that matches reality close enough that we can use that in realtime for their feedback loop. I think we’re likely very far off from either solution.

minraws

I feel like we are in the grab headlines by any means necessary part of the AI Hype cycle, maybe a bearish indicator.. either way this just felt wrong. Like what the heck kind of wrong. This truly feels like a meme rather than a genuine study or something... If I hook up claude to my car it will probably will be able to drive it, same way it can program a simulated car in a game engine, or even Jev could do it... This has be some sort of a weird marketing stunt for so called x-bros that I can't understand.

threethirtytwo

What if that mouse was a human? Why would we limit the autonomy and power of ai when human lives are at stake?

hmokiguess

Very different but made me think of a recent personal story. My father-in-law had an eye accident when he was young, and the doctor at the time said "unfortunately I don't recommend you try surgery, there's a really high risk you go blind". Fast forward to today, and 40 years later such doctor called him and said "hey, turns out we could do a cornea transplant and surgery today and you have really high chances of success!" He then went to do the surgery and now has restored his vision fully. He said the surgery was very "robotic" as in there's this super high precision device that does incredible work.

sva_

Another instant classic from the series of man-made horrors almost exceeding human comprehension

dofm

“Sooo anyway, thing is, it was only supposed to be summarising current mouse models, but it escaped the sandbox”