9 AI Techniques You Probably Haven't Tried

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
What if I told you, you were using AI all wrong? Well, then I'd be lying, and I'd clearly be trying to get you to click on something by using an absolutely ridiculous and preposterous hook. But instead, what if I told you that there were nine AI techniques that were delivering some really awesome results to some people that you might not have had the time to try just yet? That would be a lot more true because over the last couple of months we've seen a slew of new features and new tools become available like Claude's design and Codex's live voice mode and GrokBot's ability for a user to train it on an entire workflow by watching the screen. One of the things that makes AI so exciting is also the thing that makes it the most challenging, that it's changing all of the time. But today's episode is going to get you up to speed in no time at all.
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Well, my goodness, friends, the AI hype train is a hypen, but what is AI's real role in this story? Recently, there was a whole discussion between Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei and some of his critics about the tone of his messaging. One of Dario's responses to the critique that he had been overly negative was basically to say that it wasn't going to be marketing that changed people's opinions about AI, it was going to be AI actually delivering results. Specifically, he posted, I don't think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin is the way to win back trust. At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. Which is why there were a lot of folks basically saying that that's what had happened yesterday. On Wednesday, Moderna and Merck announced a successful stage 3 trial for a personalized cancer vaccine, the first late stage trial that's shown promise. The treatment functions very differently to chemotherapy based approaches. Instead of blasting the cancer with radiation, the new method involves analyzing the cancerous cells, identifying the DNA mutation causing the cancer, and creating a personalized mRNA vaccine that can correct the mutation. The trial found the treatment was successful in more than 1100 patients with advanced melanoma by extending their time in remission. Moderna and Merck have similar trials underway for lung cancer, and scientists hope the treatment can be applied to many different cancers. Dr. Ryan Sullivan, director of the Center for Melanoma and Mass General said, It's a big deal for the field in general. With this positive study, there is a hope and likely investment to follow that these approaches may change the way we treat cancer more broadly. This gave rise to a lot of very excited posts from the AI community, like this one from Chubby. This is freaking huge, they wrote. For the first time, an AI-assisted personalized mRNA cancer treatment has succeeded in a Phase 3 trial. Moderna and Merck sequence each patient's tumor and compare it to their healthy DNA. AI then helps identify which of the tumor's mutations are most likely to trigger an immune response. Absolutely incredible. Dario was right. Cancer will be cured in just a few years.
Some of course took issue with the labeling of this as AI.
Antibody 42 summed up the criticism saying, This is so dumb. They're using AI in place of machine learning because the distinction doesn't matter to people who don't care about reality. AI for mRNA design has been around for a while. It's not an LLM. And holding aside semantics, it is important to note that this is not scientists just plugging a bunch of results into ChatGPT and asking it to come up with a personalized cancer cure.