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Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread Feb 16 - Feb 23, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: Elo 15 February 2016 02:12AM

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Comment author: gwern 15 February 2016 10:29:52PM 5 points [-]

If anyone is curious about genomes: it's unlikely. Veritas only just started offering a $1k genome; no one is announcing something that'll be ready by June which is in 5 months; and if you want to extrapolate from the historical data, while we're clearly recently jumped to a new regime starting in 2015, but extrapolating from the 2015-2016 data, genomes still shouldn't be <$500 for another 10 months or so:

R> genome <- c(9408739,9047003,8927342,7147571,3063820,1352982,752080,342502,232735,154714,108065,70333,46774,
31512,31125,29092,20963,16712,10497,7743,7666,5901,5985,6618,5671,5826,5550,5096,4008,4920,4905,
5731,3970,4211,1363,1245,1000)
R> l <- lm(log(I(tail(genome, 3))) ~ I(1:3)); l
# ...Coefficients:
# (Intercept) I(1:3) # 7.3937180 -0.1548441 R> exp(sapply(1:10, function(t) { 7.3937180 + -0.1548441*t } ))
# [1] 1392.5249652 1192.7654529 1021.6617017 875.1030055 749.5683444 642.0417932 549.9400652
# [8] 471.0504496 403.4776517 345.5982592

(10 rather than 8 because the first 3 time-units, 1-3, have already passed, and the remaining 5 time-units until $471 is in time-units of 2-months, so 2*5=10. I couldn't be bothered to convert the data to more sensible days/months for a quick extrapolation.)

So I would expect any $500 genome to be in 2017 or 2018. Some dark horse could overnight announce a $500 whole-genome at any time... but I wouldn't bet on it, in part because that NHS data may not reflect any such service's existence.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 19 February 2016 12:53:40AM 0 points [-]

There is a small issue that NIH is quoting a wholesale price, while Veritas is quoting a retail price (including customer acquisition, risk of not using all capacity, and profit), so you should expect the NIH price to be lower.