Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse

143 pointsposted 2 days ago
by FacZap
(twitter.com)

125 Comments

burkaman

2 days ago

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.

ricardobeat

2 days ago

From my reading of it, the override moment was because they made a coding error which cause manual adjustment to de-sync the arm position, the agent correctly refused to continue when it noticed that.

It does seem like there is minimal "surgery" involved but it's not much of a stretch. If a surgeon took the same steps but someone else opened the skull, it would still be considered 'brain surgery', I think.

soco

2 days ago

I don't know what harnesses they run but when I daily tell Claude or others to do X and they indeed do parts of X and then also Y and break A on the way... I'm so tired of asking "but, really?" that I'm not even bothering anymore. The AI folks live in a different world than I live, and whether it's a real world or only in their minds (or only in their articles) I definitely cannot tell anymore. I simply gave up.

Forgeties79

2 days ago

Some variation of “you’re just using it wrong” is usually the refrain I hear when I talk about things LLM’s are bad at. Anything is possible if you divine the right words to input and fix your harness and set pick the perfect model and…

serf

2 days ago

> Anything is possible if you divine the right words to input and fix your harness and set pick the perfect model and…

this has been all of computers since day one, pick a better argument.

imagine this same response but towards a linker/assembler/compiler that was complaining that it couldn't compile your plain speech into exactly the thing you wanted.

I guess the presumption is this : "This thing responds and outputs to plain language decently well, that must be what it's for!" , you then decide to disregard all of computer science, programming paradigms, boilerplate, and any attached rigor that one would normally have in the crafting a computer program and get validated by garbage output : "See honey! I told you these LLMs are useless, it couldn't one shot "Make me a perfect compliant browser no mistakes." "

YES , it goes without saying that with regard to computers -- those things in which we have little choice but to interact with textually most of the time -- that the things you put into them, and the order of those things, and the tool in which you use to do the inputting matter

what a surprise .

Strange how geeks have been making magic-word incantation/wizard jokes about the practice since the 50s, huh?

pona-a

2 days ago

The purpose of "LLMs" is to magically divine that intent. Else there wouldn't be "OpenAI model solves math" articles, only "Mathematician finds Lean really neat". Programming languages already exist to specify exact intent.

Is this an impossibly high bar? Yes! But that's literally the product pitch. If it can't act as a responsible colleage how is it supposed to replace you all?

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

x3haloed

2 days ago

Yeesh. Claude still does that? I haven't had that problem since GPT 5.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

sarchertech

2 days ago

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.

dmitrygr

2 days ago

You are completely right, and I'm glad you challenged me. Your aorta is essential, and I should never have suggested otherwise. I sincerely apologize for removing it. Thank you for advocating for yourself.

butlike

a day ago

"Help! I think you injected too much of the drug!"

SAMSA Helpline -If you're addicted to drugs and feel like you need help...

simianwords

2 days ago

I don't care for mice and the small harm that it did do will be amortised over all the gains. Unlike eating meat which keeps repeating.

sarchertech

a day ago

The problems with using an agent for surgery aren’t mechanical. There’s no gain by using a live mouse at this point other than getting attention for the researcher.

simianwords

a day ago

Lets agree that there's like 0.000001% chance that it helped. It amortises over whole of humanity itself unlike you eating meat.

sarchertech

a day ago

Let’s agree there’s a 0.000001% chance this study leads someone down a dead end and ends up causing harm.

So I don’t agree that it had any measurable chance at all of helping anyone other than the author.

And if you’re being purely utilitarian, you need to weigh the opportunity cost of what else the money spent on this could have been used for. What else the researchers and peer reviewers could have done with their time, and what they else the mice could have been used for.

>eating meet

I agree this is probably not as bad as you punching babies though.

simianwords

a day ago

I love the kind of person who eats meat everyday but god forbid a single mouse is used for an experiment!

It’s just a way to show one’s virtue

Also don’t go outside your house because you may stamp on ants smh

sarchertech

a day ago

I have interacted with you before and I’d like you to know that you are very unpleasant to talk and you have atrocious debate tactics.

The way you act here makes the world just a little bit worse.

I get that telling you this isn’t likely to be constructive, but if there’s only a 0.000001% chance you reconsider acting in such an unpleasant manner in your next interaction, it was worth it.

simianwords

a day ago

I responded completely reasonably that the cost amortises. You instead brought up an absurd scenario that there’s an equal chance that someone else gets killed.

That’s a non sequitur because any action whatsoever has that property - you going outside your house may also result in a meteorite falling, would I ask you not to do it?

The mouse experiment is different because it was done for the intention of saving future lives. Not that intention matters but the everything around it implies that this mouse dying will have epsilon chance of helping humanity unlike other tasks which all else equal will not help anyone in surgery.

I’ll let it for anyone reading this to decide how to interpret this thread. And also how to judge a persons virtue if they care this much about a single mouse and not billions of chickens, pigs, cows dead every year for just purely hedonistic reasons.

I wish fewer animals were killed for meat and I wish fewer people took a * single * mouse’s death as an opportunity to show their “virtue”

sarchertech

6 hours ago

I think there are 2 problems that you have that you should consider addressing.

1. You clearly aren't reading thoroughly before replying. Please go back and reread what I said, and find where you think I said anything about someone getting killed.

2. You are arguing with your perception of the collective consciousness of Hacker News, not discussing something with an individual.

I don't have a problem with experimenting on a mouse if there's a reasonable chance the end result will save lives or meaningfully help people, and precautions are taken to prevent suffering.

I just happen to think this experiment was stupid and unlikely to provide useful data, and the only reason the researcher used a live mouse was for publicity.

>That’s a non sequitur

The it might somehow kill someone is a non sequitur because you just made that up. My actual argument is that if you say that if you are going to make a utilitarian argument that something provides more benefit than harm overall, you need to weigh the possible benefit against the possible harm.

Your argument was that we can't say for sure there will be a benefit, so lets assume some minute expected benefit.

My argument is that you can't do that without assuming some minute expected harm also exists.

Sure you can essentially ignore the minute expected harm if you believe the expected benefit dwarfs it. But that wasn't your argument, your argument was "let's agree on this minute expected benefit". I believe the expected benefit to be so small as to be immeasurable. And my belief is that it is more likely that the publicity from this result leads other people to perform similar experiments also without any measurable benefit, than that anyone benefits from it.

hmokiguess

2 days ago

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.

igleria

2 days ago

I think the most impressive thing is the doctor still being around after 40 years of profession!

tartoran

2 days ago

I don't think OP is mentioning the same doctor 40 years later. They mention "such" doctor:

"ast forward to today, and 40 years later such doctor called him and said"

hmokiguess

2 days ago

no, it was in fact the same doctor, he is really old now, that said it wasn't the same one who ended up performing the surgery

0xdeadbeefbabe

2 days ago

Even if he didn't do the surgery, he has a superior context window.

malfist

2 days ago

Must have survived a lot of compactions

hmokiguess

2 days ago

yeah our family was actually quite happy he called in to follow up, I thought that was the most beautiful thing

jwrallie

2 days ago

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

NateEag

2 days ago

> Somehow Opus 5 refusing after understanding its limitations felt like the most humane thing in the article.

This is an unfortunately true and insightful comment.

ChrisMarshallNY

2 days ago

I dunno. Doctors can be a ... bit ... arrogant. I could definitely see one going YOLO! on this kind of thing.

There's the old joke:

    What's the difference between a doctor and God?
    God doesn't think He's a doctor.

NateEag

2 days ago

Sure, as one raised by an ER doctor, I have had a very up-close-and-personal view of many doctors being arrogant.

I can't see any of the ones I've known not stepping aside on discovering they're spontaneously, unpredictably losing the memory of how to do surgical procedures.

I wouldn't go so far as to day no doctor would ever keep going on the face of that happening, but I will say to do that would be utterly inhumane.

ChrisMarshallNY

2 days ago

I think one of the issues with LLMs, is that they don't "believe" that they are in error. Humans do that regularly; even non-arrogant ones.

> If your feet are wet, and you're looking at pyramids, you're in de Nile (or a fountain in Vegas).

x3haloed

2 days ago

Yeah, I don't like the direction of any of this.

moistoreos

2 days ago

This seems supremely stupid, lazy, and performative. We know how to build custom neural networks to perform much faster with higher accuracy when custom built for a specific task. What was it doing mid-surgery? Googling "brain size of mice"?

alnwlsn

2 days ago

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

ricardobeat

2 days ago

It's an industrial part made for use on much scarier machines.

alnwlsn

2 days ago

It's a cheap imitation of one; a toy. Use it when you're helping your kid build a spaceship out of cardboard. If you want one that has actual electrical and temperature ratings beyond that of "survives shipping to Amazon Prime member" you should probably break out the McMaster catalog.

Also it isn't mounted on a panel. You'll go to slap it and it will just tip over instead of being pressed.

glimshe

2 days ago

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.

Cthulhu_

2 days ago

This is already happening though, to a point; recently, local GPs have been subsumed into larger health care provider companies, and they have set up systems so that before you can make an appointment, you need to go through a wizard and / or chat interface. Likewise, people are encouraged to go to a website and do some self-diagnosis before calling a doctor - things like "if you have a fever, how high is it and for how long have you had it?"

It's indirectly related to health insurance cost, as we have a GP shortage and they (I presume?) realized a lot of people are making appointments and wasting a GP's time for trivialties like a cough or cold.

I'm pretty sure they already have, or are experimenting with having people go through an AI chatbot first. This is already very much a thing with any kind of customer support. It's not a new development though, the preceding generation was conversational interfaces.

sznio

2 days ago

I don't want the process of getting healthcare to be as adversarial as customer support. People will be dead by the time anyone answers.

Need an ambulance? Let me escalate to the department that will escalate you to a department that will dispatch the ambulance in 5-10 business days.

mindslight

2 days ago

Tell me you've never needed significant healthcare without telling me.

It's never about "ambulances". The bureaucracy will happily call an ambulance for you, as it ends their involvement and absolves them of liability. And the ambulance company is happy to show up, as it's a large billable event. In fact when seeking/obtaining complex medical care, this is one of the failure modes you have to constantly swat away!

As for interacting with the bureaucracy to obtain real care, it's gotten to the point where it's easier to get something done calling a large bank. Navigating the medical bureaucracy is probably on the level of calling Comcast-Warner (although I haven't had the misfortune of having to deal with them for a decade, so I'm sure they've gotten worse as well).

Even before "AI", my standard experience is a multi-level phone tree, multiple mandatory announcements before you can even proceed, then waiting on hold. That merely gets you to an answering service who types a ticket into the computer system. Then you wait a ~day for a nurse to call you back (if you miss answering this call, return to step 1). Then the only urgent appointments are invariably with "nurse practitioners" who throw pre-canned advice at you, as they don't really know what they're doing. That's four layers running interference to keep you away from an actual doctor, who you will finally get to see in a month for a fifteen minute appointment, if you are lucky.

voakbasda

2 days ago

I have already given up the idea of getting heath care. I have top-shelf insurance that has all the preventative stuff included, but it is simply not worth the effort. The quality of care is not even worth my co-pay.

sheikhnbake

2 days ago

I imagine human consultation could be more expensive, at least in the US, due to liability of human error. Especially if/when AI capabilities in medical procedures becomes clearly superior.

throw93937900

2 days ago

I am looking forward to it! Right now we get doctors who are "qualified", but take you after 20 hour shift with no sleep, and do not even speak fluently in the same language as patient.

And this is on VERY expensive state helath insurance!!!

oenton

2 days ago

Why would you think AI-assisted/performed health insurance will be cheaper?

rowanG077

2 days ago

Why would you want a human? I don't see how anyone would pay more for worse care.

FacZap

2 days ago

Humans are irrational. We also value "feeling" safe. Some tricks sell the illusion for those people who can't trust 100% some technologies.

Of course I trust engineering, I know planes are safe: but when there is turbulance and I see a flight attendant just casually walking and not even reacting to it, I feel better.

Humans are still humans.

Of course, culture changes. Colective ideas and institutions adapt. But extremely slowly compared to advances in tech.

RandomLensman

2 days ago

Where can you get superior AI surgery currently?

rowanG077

2 days ago

We are talking in the context of the future. I could have elaborated I guess. I personally don't foresee a future where human doctors will in general outperform AI and robotics.

butlike

a day ago

I'd rather die in the hands of a human, at least I know it has compassion.

rowanG077

a day ago

You are certainly free to refuse medical assistance from whomever or whatever you want.

threethirtytwo

2 days ago

Bro the future is that AI will be optimized to a point where it is superior to humans when performing this surgery.

That is a different kind of scary. Because it’s justified. Why limit the ai when human lives are at stake?

bio-s

2 days ago

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

sillysaurusx

2 days ago

It’s a mouse. If you think feeding one to a snake is ethical, then it’s a little strange this would be unethical. At least the human has the mouse’s wellbeing at heart.

catlifeonmars

2 days ago

That’s not quite equivalent. For one, a responsible owner is not feeding live mice to a snake. There’s at least an opportunity to ethically euthanize the mice prior to the act.

> At least the human has the mouse’s wellbeing at heart.

You don’t know this to be true

CuriouslyC

2 days ago

Lots of owners feed fully aware "live" prey. Many snakes will refuse prey that doesn't move.

catlifeonmars

2 days ago

This is a good way to injure your snake, it definitely depends on the species and the individual temperament of the snake, but there are ways to entice a snake to eat dead mice (you can warm them, and wiggle them).

It helps to understand how snakes detect and catch prey.

suddenlybananas

2 days ago

And this is considered really creepy and weird by many people.

henrymerrilees

2 days ago

Not saying that this resolves the broader issue, but I'm not aware of any vegetarian snakes. It seems possible to differentiate this from animal experimentation.

bensyverson

2 days ago

Are you vegan?

bensyverson

2 days ago

Folks who eat meat but wring their hands about animal testing: I accept your illogical downvotes!

wzdd

2 days ago

I don’t personally agree with the stance, but it’s not prima facie illogical to consider raising and killing animals for food to be potentially more humane than animal testing, and thus to be a fan of one but not the other. See the thousands of reddit posts about small farms, raising your own etc etc.

bensyverson

a day ago

If we're cherry picking statistically insignificant examples, we can also select the most warm & fuzzy examples of animal testing too.

simianwords

2 days ago

no, it is completely illogical. Animal testing at least has amortisation properties and is utilitarian at its core. Factory farming and eating animals for food can be completely avoided.

butlike

a day ago

But why would I want to when they're delicious?

paxy

2 days ago

The term "lab rats" exists for a reason. This is in the bottom 10% of weird shit people do to animals for research.

augment_me

2 days ago

Is it more ethical to systematically shoot cows in the head, have 2000 chickens share a 500sqft enclosure, have pigs raped to create offspring, etc?

The amount of cruelty humans inflict on other animals has very little bounds, this is fairly benign in the big picture honestly.

nojvek

2 days ago

Oh well, when we talk about animal cruelty, the paradoxes of what groups of humans think is ethical is mind bending. Because humans (most of them), love to eat meat or use animal products and don't really care where it comes from.

It's a deep subject.

giancarlostoro

2 days ago

If we can even have robots that can perform critical surgeries with total precision and save more lives would that be bad?

ajcp

2 days ago

It’s the process that’s unethical, not the outcome. The ends cannot justify the means in the scientific process.

giancarlostoro

2 days ago

At which point from testing with non-animals do you go from simulated surgeries with robots to actual surgeries though? I don't want it being done unethically, but how do you promote the effort / research ethically?

ajcp

2 days ago

Welcome to the central tension in ethics! Where is the line and why?

giancarlostoro

2 days ago

At some point you have to rip out the bandaid, if they did everything possible before operating on actual test subjects, then I don't personally have an issue.

sheikhnbake

2 days ago

What is unethical about the process of using emerging technology in medical procedures?

bio-s

2 days ago

This is not a test or experiment by any measure. Someone is playing around with claude using a living animal.

sheikhnbake

2 days ago

At the risk of being a pedant, was this not literally a test to see if Claude could/would determine and then take the appropriate steps in administering an injection?

With a veterinarian conducting part of the procedure and overseeing the rest of it, and the mouse reportedly making a decent recovery, I fail to see a lapse in ethics.

mindslight

2 days ago

> I fail to see a lapse in ethics.

And presumably you are going to keep failing, because you're not trying. You're handwaving the subject away looking for some bright red "lapse" rather than seeing the everpresent contours.

I've come to see this type of indignant/defiant language as a tell that someone is refusing to consider an issue (ie ignorance).

sheikhnbake

2 days ago

I've considered the potential harm versus the realities of medical science and study.

Starting on epileptic mice versus humans seems like a reasonable starting point.

You're failing to identify any actual ethical issue beside a blanket problem with animal testing. Which I can partially agree with as there's plenty of needless abuse and inhumane treatment.

This specific case does not seem like that.

mindslight

2 days ago

First, you seem to be confusing me for the commenter who originally raised a concern.

Second, you're not really addressing my comment, rather just responding with a more polished version of your previous comment deny any issue.

My point is where are your own ethical boundaries here? For each aspect of the situation, what would have to be different to run aground of your own ethical concerns? In order to say that something is on a specific side of a line, you must know where the line actually is, right?

Third, and this doesn't apply to you as an uninvolved commenter per se, but it definitely applies to the original "experiment" - the onus is on the person performing it to demonstrate how it is ethical. A xit that reads like a kid buying some fancy equipment and playing around to see what might happen, "18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this", and a "licensed vet" as an accountability crumple zone does not inspire confidence!

sheikhnbake

2 days ago

I would say I did address your comment, I just don't seem to be spelling it out in a way that you would prefer. Which is to say I'm not sure how you can't extrapolate my ethical boundaries and considerations from my previous comment.

> potential harm versus the realities of medical science and study

> needless abuse and inhumane treatment.

> This specific case does not seem like that

PhunkyPhil

2 days ago

How much issue do you take with animal testing in the rest of medicine? We already, more or less, torture an unfathomable amount of animals to get where we are.

ajcp

2 days ago

I take great issue with animal testing. I find that unethical too.

0xdeadbeefbabe

2 days ago

It seems to me that ethics evolve to suit the process, and not the other way.

throwaway198846

2 days ago

Did they start with brain surgery or did they warm up on less consequential things like stitches?

0xbadcafebee

2 days ago

That ship sailed a long time ago. Science decided that killing mice for experiments (regardless of the experiment) is fine. In fact, a large amount of the mice killed are just redundant (not needed for a particular experiment)

mindslight

2 days ago

Oh don't worry, they made sure to have a human acting as an accountability crumple zone: "A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent."

(/s)

adamsmark

2 days ago

The mouse survived!

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

catlifeonmars

2 days ago

> The mouse survived!

Without more context, I’m not sure if that’s better or worse

tartoran

2 days ago

For the mouse sake probably not as the mouse will not be freed and no longer subjected to experiments. From the perspective of the success of this AI surgery it's likely important that the mouse survived.

AyanamiKaine

2 days ago

Every time when I see animal tests or my own meat consumption I wonder how smart all kinds of animals really are. Would I feel worse knowing, I am eating an intelligent being? See its suffering as something more?

While I have no moral conundrum about eating meat or doing scientific studies on animals, this seems like a bit unethical.

Was it really necessary to use a living mouse?

RandomLensman

2 days ago

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

rbinv

2 days ago

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.

esafak

2 days ago

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.

OleksandrC

2 days ago

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

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

tylfin

2 days ago

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

andrewshadura

2 days ago

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

markyc

2 days ago

the load bearing part of the brain was removed

throwaway198846

2 days ago

Is the load breaking part of the brain the prefrontal cortex or the brain stem?

tom_

2 days ago

Safest to remove both, just in case!

threethirtytwo

2 days ago

What if that mouse was a human?

Why would we limit the autonomy and power of ai when human lives are at stake?

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

minraws

2 days ago

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.

FacZap

2 days ago

OP submitter here: Just so you know, I posted this to start the conversation. I actually agree with you completely and find this "experiment" really odd and intentionally attention-seeking.

dofm

2 days ago

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

wslh

2 days ago

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

sva_

2 days ago

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

joshhug

2 days ago

[flagged]

thebiglebrewski

2 days ago

Haha amazing, we need more humor on HN...

Klonoar

2 days ago

No, this is the type of content you’d find on Reddit. HN shouldn’t embrace this.