BBS: TELESC.NET.BR
Assunto: Incredible Altman tales
De: Mike Powell
Data: Sat, 4 Apr 2026 08:35:18 -0500
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* Originally in: SFSciFiRea
'A guy who was not an expert...used ChatGPT to make a custom mRNA vaccine for
his dog's cancer', and other incredible tales from Sam Altman
Date:
Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:55:15 +0000
Description:
OpenAI CEO shared stories of some incredible ChatGPT and CODEX successes, but
what do they mean for you (and your doing)?
FULL STORY
Sam Altman has his head on a swivel, constantly clocking huge AI breakthroughs
that foretell a future where our biggest and sometimes most personal problems
might be solved and our wildest dreams realized by AI.
This week, in a lengthy and revealing chat with former CNN journalist and
current Mostly Human podcast host Laurie Segall, the OpenAI CEO opened up
about Sora's demise (needed the compute because something "very big and
important is about to happen"), signing up with the US Department of War
after Anthropic balked ("very important that the governments are more
powerful [than AI]"), and some remarable AI breakthroughs.
First, there's a dog's tale. "The coolest
meeting I had this week was a guy who was not an expert that used ChatGPT to
make a custom mRNA vaccine for his dog's cancer," recounted Altman. Well,
that stopped me in my tracks. After all, when people complain or worry about
all the ways OpenAI's ChatGPT and tools like it are changing the world,
spitting out scams at lightning speed, changing industries, and vaporizing
jobs like raindrops on asphalt, Altman and others will remind them about how
these same tools might, for instance, cure cancer. In this case, Altman was
offering a literal example.
The story is not apocryphal. While Altman didn't
reveal the man's name, it wasn't hard to find the story of Australian tech
CEO Paul Conyngham and his dog, Rosie. According to Phys.org , Conyngham, who
has no medical background, was distraught over his misdiagnosed dog, Rosie.
Doctors had missed the cancer, and the dog was past the point of traditional
treatment. Conyngham
didn't create the mRNA vaccine. Instead, he started peppering ChatGPT (and
soon, Gemini and Grok) with questions about cancer therapies. As he told
Phys.org, "I would have conversations and just keep them going non-stop." The
key piece of advice he got was to have his dog's genome sequenced and analyze
her DNA. The goal was to identify Rosie's mutated genes. For that, Phys.org
reports, he used the AlphaFold scientific model.
ChatGPT even recommended that Conyngham work
with researchers at the University of New South Wales, who then developed a
custom mRNA vaccine that appears to have worked on Rosie. It's a remarkable
tale, and now Conyngham is opening up the research to other desperate dog
owners ( he posted a Google form on LinkedIn ). This is not the only AI
success story, Altman shared. Altman, who complained that OpenAI's Codex
AI coding agent model is not yet smart enough to help him cook up new
side-project ideas, shared the startling story of someone who used the
platform to build a billion-dollar company by themself.
Segall was asking about the possibility that a sole entrepreneur might
someday use these tools to build the next billion-dollar company.
"I believe that has happened," said Altman, who wasn't at liberty to offer
any details like the name of the entrepreneur, the business, or what it does.
"It is a legitimate single-person billion-dollar company as far as I can
tell. I have not like reviewed the financials, but I think it's just
happened," added Altman.
The way this person built it might be more interesting. It was all done with
Codex.
Altman called the founder "One of the top users of Codex of all time," and
"just like unbelievably productive in a way that no single person could have
been.
Altman was so impressed that he hired the entrepreneur. AI is your new
partner What these two stories have in common is a pair of obsessive people
who are pushing the AI's to their limits.
As someone on LinkedIn noted on Conyngham's page, "Paul didn't have a biology
degree. He had 17 years of pattern recognition, a dying dog he loved, and the
willingness to treat an impossible problem as a data problem."
In the case of the entrepreneur, it doesn't sound like they dropped a brief
prompt into Codex and then walked away while it built and ran a company. Most
of the best work coming out of AI is collaborative, with the collaboration
between you and the AI.
Prompts are merely a starting point. The conversation and refinement of those
requests is what gets the work done and drives you and the AI to a final
product.
In the case of Rosie the dog, the mRNA vaccine was not developed and
administered by the AI. ChatGPT and the other platforms were like very smart
research assistants, digging through the reams of data on dog cancer research
to find meaningful information and make recommendations. Conyngham figured
out what to do with it and then turned to the human experts to make it
happen.
Link to news story:
https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/a-guy-who-was-not-an-expert-
used-chatgpt-to-make-a-custom-mrna-vaccine-for-his-dogs-cancer-and-other-incre
dible-tales-from-sam-altman
$$
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* Origin: Capitol City Online (1:2320/107)
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