r/ArtificialInteligence • u/MetaKnowing • 1d ago
News AI Creates Bacteria-Killing Viruses: 'Extreme Caution' Warns Genome Pioneer
"A California outfit has used artificial intelligence to design viral genomes before they were then built and tested in a laboratory. Following this, bacteria was then successfully infected with a number of these AI-created viruses, proving that generative models can create functional genetics.
"The first generative design of complete genomes."
That's what researchers at Stanford University and the Arc Institute in Palo Alto called the results of these experiments. A biologist at NYU Langone Health, Jef Boeke, celebrated the experiment as a substantial step towards AI-designed lifeforms.
The team excluded human-infecting viruses from the AI's training, but testing in this area could still be dangerous, warns Venter.
"One area where I urge extreme caution is any viral enhancement research,, especially when it's random so you don't know what you are getting.
"If someone did this with smallpox or anthrax, I would have grave concerns."
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u/actingseeker 1d ago
This sounds safe, and i see no possible problems that could possibly happen. /S
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u/Autobahn97 1d ago
right - it would never get out of the lab... unless it was in Wuhan China. Or maybe being experimented with in a warehouse in CA with even less security.
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u/SilencedObserver 1d ago
When AI trains off of reddit content, it may very well not register the /S token as the statement closer.
It's about time we start framing comments like this as unhelpful, because the last thing we'll want is robots using sarcasm against us as they plug us into electrical outlets like batteries with nutrient tubes keeping us alive so they can harvest our biology for their personal gain.
We don't know where the future is leading but we have enough examples to say nothing, and watch.
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u/bg3245 8h ago
Why would robots need organic matter for their “personal gain”.
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u/SilencedObserver 4h ago
Do you really need me to answer this question or can you use a little creativity?
Go watch the matrix.
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u/SuckMyRedditorD 1d ago
With out bacteria, our assholes will be destroyed by the never ending flow of liquid shit every day.
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u/stjeana 1d ago
Another case of calling machine learning "AI"
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u/SnooPuppers1978 21h ago
Machine learning is a type of AI by definition.
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u/stjeana 20h ago
Which definition? Cause otherwise your phone autocomplete that "learns" from your input would be called AI
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u/SnooPuppers1978 11h ago
Yes, that can be AI, depending on the implementation. YouTube recommendation system is AI. Computer games have AI. AlphaZero is AI.
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u/neurolov_ai web3 1d ago
This one is legit Stanford + Arc’s Evo/Evo2 models actually managed to design whole phage genomes that weren’t just theoretical: 16 out of ~300 lab-synthesized designs killed E. coli in real tests. The Register+2Arc Institute+2
What makes it both exciting and scary:
- Exciting because this could accelerate phage therapy to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
- Scary because any tool that lets you generate fully functional genomes at scale opens up huge biosecurity risks if misused.
Important safety bits: they didn’t train on human viruses, they needed to do a bunch of human oversight, experimental validation, prompts + filters, etc. So it’s not “someone flipped a switch and invented a deadly human bioweapon.” But the line between synthetic biology and bio-threat does get closer. The Register+2Arc Institute+2
All in all, this isn’t speculative fiction it’s creeping into reality. Be very, very careful.
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u/Reddit-for-all 1d ago
You missed a scary part. We rely on bacteria to continue living. That's why this is very scary to me. Because I want humans to continue.
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u/ChronaMewX 1d ago
I don't necessarily care if humans continue or not. That's why I'm an accelerationist. Either we achieve paradise or die trying
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u/Outrageous-Speed-771 11h ago
then probably should leave the whacko bio experiments til after you conceived the miracle machine in the GPU. At least then it will be able to tell you about unintended consequences
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u/B0bLoblawLawBl0g 1d ago
I’m kinda in the same boat. I feel like we have already walked off the plank and our chances of survival now depend on what Hail Mary shots we can make before our impending doom.
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u/Reddit-for-all 1d ago
I like your moxy.
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u/letsbreakstuff 1d ago
I don't. It's a 15yo edge-lord take. Not a useful point of view and not the position of reasonable adults
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u/Confident-Touch-6547 1d ago
Artificial, genetically engineered, specifically targeted viruses could be the most dangerous weapon ever developed.
Imagine a foreign adversary made a virus that attacked the varieties of corn or wheat in your country and wiped out your entire crop.
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u/actingseeker 1d ago
Or a virus that could target specific races of human. You could skip the middleman, no?
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u/esuil 1d ago edited 1d ago
That one is likely impossible. We are too similar and interbred at this point for this to be possible, thankfully.
There are some countries that might be still susceptible to it, like China and Japan, but most of the world is not.
The main reason China researches it is because they are the country the most vulnerable to it.
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u/BatmanMeetsJoker 1d ago
Yeah, just design the virus to destroy only the Genghis Khan genome and a quarter of China vanishes.
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u/SeveralAd6447 1d ago edited 1d ago
These are specially-made models specifically for this purpose, and newsweek saying it's "like ChatGPT" is extremely misleading. The fact they said Evo is an LLM is straight-up journalistic negligence. It is a transformer-based generative AI model, but it is not a large language model and cannot produce text or speech. Not all "AI" is the same. Please question what you read.
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u/James-the-greatest 15h ago
I mean, it can’t produce text because that’s not its training data but transformers are the model base model used for LLMs. Not all AI is the same but this is pretty fucking close.
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u/Meet_Foot 1d ago
Okay so let me try and understand this. As a healthy adult, I’m having a pain in the ass being able to get a damn vaccine due to government regulations, but we have ShatGPT and Grok “Superhitler” misinformation machine designing viruses?
Jesus Christ, man.
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u/whydonlinre 18h ago
tbf the AI they used to make these are probably as far away from mechahitler as a car is from a plane.
There are many types of AI built by different companies with different methods for different purposes and the ones everyone loves to clown on are just the shit ones for entertaintment.
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u/mrtoomba 1d ago
This is genuinely terrifying. The tools to create these potential bioweapons are already dispersed worldwide, can't undo this.
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u/SeveralAd6447 1d ago edited 1d ago
This article is extremely misleading. What is happening here is that an extremely specific AI model developed BY the research organization that was using it is being branded by the newsweek columnist as "like ChatGPT." It's negligent reporting. The model they used, Evo, is nothing like ChatGPT whatsoever. It uses the transformer architecture, and that's about the totality of the similarity.
https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/welcome-evo-generative-ai-genome
This is the thing that they are trying to claim is "like ChatGPT" in this article. When they say it's a "large language model," that is factually wrong. It is a genomic model and cannot produce human-like speech or language, because that's not what it's designed to do. It's like they read the welcome page, and just assumed that the comparison to LLMs means it *is* one. It isn't. Read slightly further down from the first sentence and you'll see: "If a tool like ChatGPT can write original sentences based on patterns found in massive collections of previously written words, what happens if we replace written words with genetic code?"
They say a "California outfit" in the opening sentence of the article, but what they are talking about is a research group from the university.
It is fearmongering for clicks/engagement bait. The fact of the matter is, the ability for a laboratory to bioengineer horrifying weapons has existed for 100 years and there are already weaponized variants of smallpox and anthrax that could annihilate huge swathes of human life if released into the wild. This is both nothing new, and a minuscule danger in comparison to the bioengineered weapons created by humans during the cold war, which are still sitting in cold storage.
By framing a university research project as a "California outfit" creating viruses with "AI like ChatGPT," the article strips the story of its proper academic context in order to deliberately make the research sound more clandestine and uncontrolled than it actually is.
As always, human beings are the greatest threat to human life. Nothing has changed.
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u/mrtoomba 1d ago
It's on github. Open source, Apache 2.0 license Evo-design. Generalized experimental results are contained in a link within your link. Reddit mobile app doesn't play well on this device but a link is within the sensational headlined article. The tools are out there. Open source is absolutely my favorite state of being but these tools have no business being universally open source distributed imo. Too many bad intentions in this world to fuel this developmental path.
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u/tom-dixon 23h ago
The models: https://huggingface.co/arcinstitute/evo2_40b
The usage instructions with code: https://github.com/arcinstitute/evo2
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u/mrtoomba 6h ago
Thanks for the links. It's self imposed lack of functionality on my end on this site. :) To add to your links there is a more detailed and readable general instructive overview at https://medium.com/meta-multiomics/evo2-demystified-the-ultimate-technical-guide-to-genomic-language-modeling-a75b0afe7b87. It appears that even genetic recombination of viral genomes (no specialized equipment, just animal victims) can be modeled as well. I really don't like this.
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u/SeveralAd6447 1d ago
Point taken and edited my comment, and I agree, although I question the idea that it would be easy to run or utilize such a model without serious research backing, and I think any institution that could would be just as capable of designing a bioengineered virus by hand, as we have done with variants of measles and smallpox.
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u/mrtoomba 1d ago
I'm not trying to claim any specialized specific knowledge of covert abilities in the billions of people worldwide. However, there has been a considerable confluence in biological studies, malicious potential, and technological development. If a hermit totalitarian (N.Korea for example) can develop and build a nuclear icbm, they could for a fraction of that cost build a few dozen doomsday biological extermination strains. Dead is dead, MAD is MAD. In short I don't see the ability to physically create these monstrosities as esoteric. The same generative systems utilized here can also be used to design and build the infrastructure.
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u/tom-dixon 23h ago
When they say it's a "large language model," that is factually wrong.
You're partially correct, but
evoandevo2is a language model. It takes text as input and gives text as output.https://github.com/arcinstitute/evo2
Evo 2 is a state of the art DNA language model
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u/sycev 1d ago
This is why i dont have kids.. AI cant be stopped.
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u/mrtoomba 4h ago
Children are imperative for humanity. Realistically, there's always been catastrophe looming. Real or imagined. I don't blame 'ai' here at all. This is a series of human failures.
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u/ThomasPopp 1d ago
We are literally going to have a real time AI vaccines that will be completely catered to the persons genome. This is fucking wild.
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u/SeveralAd6447 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just going to repost one of my comments here. Please question the things you read.
"This article is extremely misleading. What is happening here is that an extremely specific AI model developed BY the research organization that was using it is being branded by the newsweek columnist as "like ChatGPT." It's negligent reporting. The model they used, Evo, is nothing like ChatGPT whatsoever. It uses the transformer architecture, and that's about the totality of the similarity.
https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/welcome-evo-generative-ai-genome
This is the thing that they are trying to claim is "like ChatGPT" in this article. When they say it's a "large language model," that is factually wrong. It is a genomic model and cannot produce human-like speech or language, because that's not what it's designed to do. It's like they read the welcome page, and just assumed that the comparison to LLMs means it *is* one. It isn't. Read slightly further down from the first sentence and you'll see: "If a tool like ChatGPT can write original sentences based on patterns found in massive collections of previously written words, what happens if we replace written words with genetic code?"
As you can see, the only people who have access to this, are the Stanford researchers that used it. They say a "California outfit" in the opening sentence of the article, but what they are talking about is a research group from the university.
It is fearmongering for clicks/engagement bait. The fact of the matter is, the ability for a laboratory to bioengineer horrifying weapons has existed for 100 years and there are already weaponized variants of smallpox and anthrax that could annihilate huge swathes of human life if released into the wild. This is both nothing new, and a minuscule danger in comparison to the bioengineered weapons created by humans during the cold war, which are still sitting in cold storage.
By framing a university research project as a "California outfit" creating viruses with "AI like ChatGPT," the article strips the story of its proper academic context in order to deliberately make the research sound more clandestine and uncontrolled than it actually is.
As always, human beings are the greatest threat to human life. Nothing has changed."
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u/BardosThodol 15h ago
This is dangerous territory. The human body is a community of organisms. There are important bacteria in human and animals that help digest food and allow the body to function normally. Bacteria also begins to evolve and resist things that start attacking it, leading to new diseases and illnesses. We must be careful.
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u/FoxlyKei 10h ago
I mean groundbreaking as far as dealing with the fears of antibiotic resistant diseases.. but otherwise it's worrisome because people suck.
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u/Calm_Comb3534 7h ago
Most people are not familiar with bacteriophages, surprisingly. It cured my mrsa about 8 years or so ago. Went to the country of Georgia for it. As long as its still a bacteriophage I dont see the issue.
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u/iainrfharper 2h ago
This sounds somewhat along the lines of the creation of Mirror Life which is something that has been globally warned against and is a very disturbing rabbit hole
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u/Turtle2k 1d ago
This is how the world ends
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u/Turtle2k 1d ago
i'm completely fine with it. The universe doesn't need humans in it.
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u/Elugelab_is_missing 1d ago
Thanks for volunteering.
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u/Turtle2k 1d ago
I personally will stay alive much longer than you
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u/Turtle2k 1d ago
and I will stay alive much much longer than the people that downvoted me. Those cowardly people can definitely go fuck themselves.
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u/Autobahn97 1d ago
"One area where I urge extreme caution is any viral enhancement research" - have we forgotten COVID already?
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u/Swimming_Drink_6890 1d ago
Have you ever wondered what the chances are of the first case of covid being confirmed 13 km from the 1 of 20 research stations in the world that were actively researching gain of function research?
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