AMA Part 1: Is Claude Code AGI? Are we in a bubble? Plus Live Player Analysis

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. This is our AMA episode. My schedule has been a little bit crazy lately, and so I never actually really scheduled this with anyone. And so there's nobody here to ask me the question. So I'm just going to read the questions myself and then give you my answers. But I did get some really good questions and I'm excited to answer them. And hopefully people will enjoy this episode and find some value in it. With that, by far the first and most important question and the most common question that I'm getting these days is, how is my son Ernie doing since the big episode that I did about his cancer back in November? And the good news is he is doing really quite well. I'm very pleased to report that. Certainly cancer and certainly cancer of this type, being as aggressive as it is, and I won't belabor the whole thing from last time, go check out the two hour monologue on that if you want the full story. But a cancer this aggressive, which can double as quickly as every 24 hours, does get very aggressive treatment. And so he has been through the wringer with the chemotherapy. He's through basically half the chemotherapy now. There are six rounds in total and he's been through three. The final two rounds, the rounds five and six, are supposed to be a little more mild than the first four. So depending on how you count, we could say he's maybe a little more than halfway through the treatment, but somewhere that. And it's definitely been rough on him. There's no doubt about it. When he went into the hospital, he was 51 pounds. He's still 41 pounds today, and that's the weight that he came home at after the first round of treatment. He's been able to gain a little weight, lost it back, gained a little, gets dehydrated, loses a little. So you can just see looking at him, he's super thin, he's quite pale, he's definitely not nearly as strong as he was before we went in. But on the markers that really count the most, namely like, does it look like the cancer is being effectively treated? There he looks really good. After the first round of chemotherapy, the PET scan that he had showed no obvious focal points of cancer. When our oncologist met with the tumor board, they all agreed that it made sense to classify him as being in remission as of before he even started the second round of treatment. So that is great.
We also, if you listen to that earlier long episode, might recall that one of the things that AI helped me do is identify some additional testing that is not yet standard of care but can be done to try to get a better, more sensitive take on is there any cancer left in his body, if so, how much, and how is it trending. That's called minimal residual disease testing. And I don't know how it works in all different kinds of cancers, but in the cancer that he has, which is a cancer of the B cell, the B cells do this interesting thing where they rearrange certain parts of their genetic material in a purposeful way, random I think, virtually semi-random but purposeful, so that they create variation so that they can have a better chance of creating proteins that bind to new disease factors that are in the body. And so this process of differentiating B cells is literally unique cell by cell. And then when one of those cells goes bad and becomes cancerous and grows out of control, they can use that rearrangement that individual cell did that then gave rise to the whole cancerous process in the body, they can use that random re-sequencing or shuffling up of its own sequence that it did to essentially fingerprint that cell type. And so there are two sequences, one for each of the chromosome pairs, where this rearrangement happens, that they've identified as being the dominant clone or cancer in the body. And now that they've identified that, now we can do a blood test every so often and check to see how much of that DNA is there floating free in the blood and how many live cells actually have that DNA sequence. So, we've so far only got one of those tests back, and we will want to certainly look at more and trend it over time. But the first one that came back, and this is all the way back now over a month ago, that it was drawn, came back with fewer than one cell in a million detecting that DNA sequence. So, that's really good. They also called that like below the LOD, or Limit of Detection for the test. So it was basically sort of in that area where they even, such a low rate, not zero, but such a low rate that they would expect that like maybe some samples would have zero and some maybe would have one cell or two, but it's a very low rate. For reference, we estimated that when he was diagnosed, potentially as many as one in ten cells in his body, and essentially all of the B cells were of the cancerous type. To go from one in ten total cells and a large majority of the B cells down to one in a million cells detected or less, that's obviously I think it was Gemini that said it was 99.9999 percent reduced. Other AIs were a little less colorful in their language. It said it was probably safer to say that it was in orders of magnitude reduction. But that's great. We'll do more testing of that type and we'll certainly be watching it. But as of now, we are feeling cautiously optimistic that he is on the path to a cure and a full recovery. In some ways, the recovery is already underway. It was 60 days from before we went into the hospital, maybe a week before, to just around Christmas time, that he was not able to get around by himself. He could stand, but to walk, we would always hold his hand and just make sure that he had support literally every step that he took. Finally, around the Christmas time, we had a chance to come home for a week from the hospital, and during that window, he regained some strength, started getting around by himself. Unfortunately, that has been sustained for the last two weeks or so since he started doing that. Hopefully, knock on wood, certainly, there is some risk. They don't understand exactly why this cancer can come back in some patients, even when it looks like it's gone.