The quest for a cancer cure dates back thousands of years. Some of the earliest known research dates to ancient Egypt, where Imhotep, the physician and architect to King Djoser, described a human tumor on papyrus around 2600 BC.
Now, a growing chorus of tech leaders is singing the praises of AI as the key to solving the medical mystery that has puzzled physicians for millennia. It’s what Google president Ruth Porat predicted last October. And it’s why Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei coined the term “the compressed 21st century,” reflecting his view that AI will accelerate medical progress. But some in the medical field think that forecast is at least a bit overshot.
In a recent interview on the Plain English podcast with Derek Thompson, Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks said AI is far from curing the disease.
“If you just ask them to solve biology or chemistry questions, they’re not particularly good at it,” he said. “They’re trained on the human language, not on the language of chemistry, physics, and biology.”
One reason AI investment has reached record levels, rivaling the GDP of some developed countries, is the belief that the technology could enable revolutionary scientific breakthroughs. During President Donald Trump’s press briefing announcing the Stargate Project last year—a $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure through 2029—Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison said the project could lead to a cancer vaccine, one that could be devised within just 48 hours.
