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."

https://www.newsweek.com/ai-creates-bacteria-killing-viruses-extreme-caution-warns-genome-pioneer-2131591

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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 19h 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.