Not so fast with private industry promises about AI for cancer vaccine

Considerable hurdles ahead

The day after his inauguration, President Trump announced a private sector investment of up to $500 billion to fund infrastructure for artificial intelligence.
Three companies - ChatGPT's creator OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle are planning a joint venture called Stargate.

Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison spoke at the Project Stargate announcement in the White House on January 21.

Let’s look closely at what he said (highlights added):

You can do early cancer detection with a blood test…and using AI to look at the blood test you can find the cancers that are seriously threatening the person. So cancer diagnosis using AI has the promise of just being a simple blood test. Then beyond that, once we gene sequence that tumor you can then vaccinate the person…design a vaccine for every individual person. And you can make that vaccine robotically again using AI in about 48 hours. So imagine: early cancer detection, the development of a vaccine for your particular cancer aimed at you, and have that vaccine available in 48 hours. This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future.

A promise is defined as “a declaration or assurance that a particular thing will happen….a legally binding declaration that gives the person to whom it is made a right to expect or to claim the performance of a specified act.”

There are sound reasons to question these promises.

First, anytime you hear anyone talk about a simple blood test - as Ellison did - alarm bells should go off in your head. Sure, drawing the blood is simple. But with any test, one needs to know what is the rate of false positives (results that suggest you have a problem when, indeed, you don’t) and false negatives (results that suggest you don’t have a problem when, indeed, you do). You can’t know that when you haven’t made the test yet.

Second, with any such test, you should think about what you would do if the test really did find something concerning. Are there treatments available? And if such AI-aided tests and such vaccine development is shown to be possible, how sound is the evidence for how well they work and how safe they are? And have the technologies been tested in enough people to show that they are statistically and clinically significant?

Third, what are the costs? Would all Americans have equitable access?

Fourth, Ellison got out ahead of his skis, as they say, in promising individually-tailored vaccines developed in 48-hour turnaround time - when this has not yet been done.

Fifth, the White House announcement was a media event on the second day of a new Administration. It provided a platform for business executives to make some bold promises.The three billionaires who joined the President for the White House event are not physicians nor biomedical researchers. When you think about these promises, follow the money.

These are not simple issues - especially with no evidence in hand for these promises at the time the promises were made. Yes, AI has already made some significant in-roads in health care and biomedical research. But nothing to back up these quite specific promises made in the White House media event.

Here are some of the comments that YouTube viewers left after watching that Ellison video:

• Sounds like he’s talking to children.

• Don’ t be giving people false hope. This news will bring tears of hope and distrust.

• Sounds impressive. I don’t trust him.

• Goodness! How stupid does he and his partners in crime think we are????

• I am a physician. Larry Ellison's project shows extremely poor understanding of the human body, about cancer pathology and about how to treat it.

• So I assume safety testing will be done within the first 24 hours right? I mean, especially considering this is meant to be tailored to each individual person. You wouldn't want to skip the safety testing now.... would you?

Some viewers, who have heard quite a bit of anti-vaccination talk from the new Administration, seemed surprised to hear this White House vaccine promotion. Some of their comments:

• Put your vaccine to…you know where.

• Just when we thought Trump might help us. Naive or what?

• Those who fail to learn from history (especially the Covid era) are Doomed to repeat it.

• I love President Trump but I’m not liking talk of another mRNA vaccine did we not learn anything from the Covid debacle??

There’s also bad blood between Trump supporter Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. OpenAI is one of the 3 companies planning the Stargate project that was announced in the White House event.

Excerpt of the AP story, above:

A 7-year-old rivalry between tech leaders Elon Musk and Sam Altman over who should run OpenAI and prevent an artificial intelligence “dictatorship” is now heading to a federal judge as Musk seeks to halt the ChatGPT maker’s ongoing shift into a for-profit company.

Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued the artificial intelligence company earlier this year alleging it had betrayed its founding aims as a nonprofit research lab benefiting the public good rather than pursuing profits.

Musk has since escalated the dispute, adding new claims and asking for a court order that would stop OpenAI’s plans to convert itself into a for-profit business more fully.

The world’s richest man, whose companies include Tesla, SpaceX and social media platform X, last year started his own rival AI company, xAI. Musk says it faces unfair competition from OpenAI and its close business partner Microsoft, which has supplied the huge computing resources needed to build AI systems such as ChatGPT.

This Bloomberg video clip has more on the Musk-Altman brouhaha:

So there are some legal and political concerns to clean up before delivering on these promises.

At the White House Stargate media event, Oracle’s Ellison wasn’t the only one to make big promises. OpenAI’s Altman said, "I believe that as this technology progresses, we will see diseases get cured at an unprecedented rate.”

Altman is entitled to his own opinions and beliefs. It’s easy to inflate expectations now. But a thorny path lies ahead. My belief is that nobody should talk about cures - much less at an unprecedented rate - when we haven’t seen any yet. I’ve already identified a number of unresolved issues and as yet unfulfilled promises that could shoot down the Stargate’s plans with data-driven doses of reality.

I can imagine, in households dotted across the US, people who heard or read Ellison’s promises running to a family member, excitedly sharing the news. “Did you hear that? There’s gonna be a cure. And it’s gonna come specially designed for you. And it’s gonna come within 48 hours after they test your blood!” The time for such excitement may come, but it’s not here now. You haven’t done it until you’ve done it.