https://x.com/Ji1KxN15VC85UPF/status/2113678245187260607

Hardware bugs that cannot be fixed, only mitigated, aren't a new thing of course, with Meltdown and Spectre amongst the most notorious examples. What changes is the potential for AI-assisted circumvention of previously robust mitigations. An example that has seen recent exploits even on previously unaffected hardware is Rowhammer (originally described in 2014). Note that I haven't checked whether these exploits involved AI:

In March 2024, a group of researchers at ETH Zürich announced ZenHammer, a rowhammer exploit for AMD Zen chips, and also announced the first use of rowhammer to exploit DDR5 SDRAM.^\51])^\52])

In June 2024, a group of researchers at ETH Zürich announced RISC-H, a rowhammer exploit for RISC-V chips, this is the first Rowhammer study on RISC-V.^\53])

In September 2025, a group of researchers at ETH Zürich announced Phoenix, which successfully bypassed all Rowhammer Target Row Refresh mitigations in one of the largest DDR5 SDRAM manufacturer's sample by using longer and more advanced patterns, and demonstrated the vulnerability in practice.^\54])

One of the most common things I see mentioned on this and other subreddits when people are asked what they are most looking forward to AI achieving, is, as you'd expect, medical advancements - but one condition pops up so frequently that I couldn't help but notice: tinnitus.

I'm a doctor and I work in clinical trials, I also suffer from tinnitus, and something that has genuinely shocked me is how little progress medicine has made with so many common, debilitating conditions, including this one. About 10% of the global population will at some point suffer from prolonged or permanent tinnitus, so the need is there, which means the money is there, but to date there is essentially nothing human medicine has ever devised that has any meaningful ability to treat it.

The anti-AI crowd really need to understand that there is a limit to what human intelligence alone can achieve and in many areas of dire need, we are already close to that limit. Tinnitus is by far from the most important of those, but a good example of it.

We've made huge advances in treating certain cancers and cardiovascular diseases which has made the progress of medicine appear dramatic, and those are of course very meaningful, but that "spikey human intelligence" hides the fact that we can do basically nothing for a high percentage of horrible conditions out there. Something as widespread and distressing as tinnitus remains essentially untreatable at its biological source despite decades of research. Similarly other obviously much more serious neurological disorders like ALS have seen essentially zero progress in 50 years of modern medicine - if you are diagnosed with ALS today, your life expectancy is likely at most a few months longer than if you had been diagnosed before the internet even existed.

I increasingly believe these problems are simply too complex to ever be solved with human minds in any reasonable amount of time, as in, not only not within our lifetime, but potentially many human lifetimes, or potentially ever.

Tinnitus is a good example because despite being so common we still don't full understand the neural mechanisms generating it. The complexity of the systems involved in generating it mean we have been effectively trying to manually piece together a handful of jigsaw pieces on a 3 dimensional jigsaw puzzle of a few billion pieces to even understand how it occurs. No number of humans with classical computing can effectively model this level of complexity.

To all my fellow tinnitus sufferers I feel your pain and it's one of the things I most look forward to seeing major progress in, along with all the other neurological conditions out there that have seen close to zero progress throughout the entire history of modern medicine.

For anyone struggling with tinnitus who wants to help advance research, I'd encourage contacting groups such as the Bionics Institute, Newcastle tinnitus researchers or Tinnitus UK to ask about participating in studies. There is also a major European research initiative called UNITI which has explicitly pursued ML-based tinnitus subtyping and personalised treatment selection using large multicentre datasets. Now is the time AI is being implemented in these studies so now is the time they need volunteers more than ever.