Why go for the cures right?
Paywalled source
https://ft.trib.al/Uk6VCRG
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does it actually exist or is it a “simulation” again
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we’ve been using ai for decades, just not like the llm ai
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The title is misleading. It wasn’t an LLM, but a bespoke, dedicated system.
And yes, I know that’s sort of “AI,” but these days when that word is used, the average person equates it to ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever text chatbot they’re familiar with.
This basically has nothing to do with that. Scientists have been making models for design and data synthesis forever.
It was an LLM trained on mountains of research.
I don’t think so. I don’t have access to the research, but almost assuredly it is a custom neural network for specifically things like this. An LLM would never be able to describe in detail the virus to a point that researchers would be able to fabricate it. That’s just not how that works.
You don’t understand. This isn’t a debate. They used Evo1 and Evo2 which are both LLMs. That is just a fact. You don’t understand what LLMs are. I’m not trying to be mean or rude, it’s simply true if you think an LLM couldn’t do this, because it literally did.
Edit: sorry, that probably came of extremely rude and short tempered, and I shouldn’t treat you that way.
LLMs are not only chat-bots, and in fact so not even need to “speak” any language you or I would recognize. Evo 1 & 2 are LLMs built off of raw genomic data. Literally the raw A, C, G, T pattern of the genetic code itself. Trillions of nucleotides. So the output of the LLM wasn’t “Here’s what a bacteriophage would look like!” It was “AT,CG,AG…” Raw genetic code which can then be synthesized.
That thing looks like it’s a 'billion" residues long. Granted I have only rudimentary understanding of proteins, as I did my master years ago on thermodynamics, but using enzymes as the system.
How can you be sure anything in there will fold correctly. That you can design and describe a synthetic virus that in theory will work, but actually making it?
Edit: Ah, normal GMO, just used the models to tell them what to modify. Not a complete synthetic virus. Probably just did some normal injection of new lines in existing viruses.
Okay so, am I crazy here or does that mean it’s just a machine learning neural network. Which is what LLMs are, but LLMs are specifically designed for language. That’s their whole purpose. If this was not designed for language isn’t it by definition not a LLM.
Yes, language – a LLM trained only on English writing will have zero ability to respond to a question in Spanish. These LLM are trained in the language of genetics (e.g. ACTG).
It’s like putting an internal combustion engine in a car or a boat. One navigates land and the other water, but the engine can actually just be the same one.
You’re mixing up colloquial usage with scientific usage. Scientists are notoriously bad at giving things names (thanks dark matter…) All LLMs are neural networks. All neural networks are AI. Not all AI are neural networks. Not all neural networks are LLMs. This is a case of nested hierarchies, like phylogenetic taxonomies. You are a bony fish.
So yes, LLMs are literally just a form of neural networks, but the language they learn on does not have to specifically be English, or German. And this “Language” was genetic code. So Evo1 and Evo2 Literally speak genetic code. That is their language, since it is what they were trained on. They are predictive text models that can predict what the next genetic sequence will/should be.
Technically, not misleading. It’s that LLMs are not AI. The world is misleading! Title is actuate!
That’s objectively false. LLMs are neural networks, which is a form of AI.
AI is a massive umbrella, under which LLMs are categorized.
Don’t fucking post images of headlines.
Find a source that isn’t paywalled and link to the article. Or don’t post anything at all.
Or fuck off? Like is it harder to read in a picture? Want me to clean your screen, wipe your ass too?
People who aren’t illiterate actually read articles. You post the information about the article so that people know if they want to read it or not. Then we discuss the contents of the article with other assholes who also read the article.
Because discussing with others who have also only read the blurb is fucking useless because nobody knows a fucking thing.
Posting the article link both makes it easy to facilitate this while also maintaining the polite fiction that the other dumbasses could have at least in theory read the article.
You are posting here but you have no fucking idea what the fucking point of such forums is because you are an illiterate child and then you have the nerve to get angry. You don’t have to provide a link… you don’t have to make a post either you could leave that task to the actual adults.
Also the culture of posting such pictures results in trivial fakes blending in because idiots judge the veracity of the source pictured without any way to authenticate unlike a fucking url.
Please have my child
🥇gold
Pictures are not reliable sources for information. It promotes a culture of disinformation.
And blind people can’t read words in images.
There, a link to the source of the picture… https://bsky.app/profile/financialtimes.com/post/3msgnagdoh72l you can now bathe in more pixels
Site doesn’t load
Yeah fuck people who use screen readers and/or are broke hahaha what losers.
/s in case it’s needed
Nah, you dont even whip the shit off your own chin after eating all that
I’m guessing it created it the same way i created a giant eight limbed creature called an Octophant, using a piece of paper and a pencil.
It does not make it exist.
According to this non-paywalled article, it created thousands of potential genomes from which the scientists running the experiment chose three hundred promising candidates. They then had bacteria make those and used them for their bacteriophagy experiment. So essentially the AI made the blueprints that the scientists then turned into real stuff.
Let’s get real here. Could the bacteria make my Octophant if I clean up the pencil lines?!
Cat girls first dangit! Get in line.
Unfortunately the science hasn’t gotten that far yet, but maybe in the future.
So the AI’s role in all this, given that creating new viruses in a lab is already understood and well-practiced, was just to generate a list of virus configuration options (presumably working from existing examples), from which scientists had to discard ~90% of what the AI generated before moving on to the next step.
Sounds like an attempt at a headline more than a genuine scientific effort.
Scientists had no clue at all how to design bacteriophages is my understanding. Only with the help of LLM have they been able to generate the first man-made bacteriophages ever.
So the AI’s role in this process, which is already known and well-practiced,
Uh… no? Creating custom-made genomes for curing specific diseases isn’t “known and well-practiced;” it’s an area of active research.
from which scientists had to discard ~90% of what the AI generated before moving on to the next step.
That’s basically in line with how AI is used in similar applications; even if most of what you get is busts AI can make so much stuff that it can compete with (or even outdo) other alternatives by sheer quantity. Sure someone has to filter out the useful stuff from the trash, but the very fact that it produces useful stuff makes it worth it. This method is well-established in other areas, so there’s no reason to dismiss it here.
Same question to you, why would you do this?
Consider the military and industrial applications of the octophant.
[You Have Been Reported to the Raytheon Ethics Board]
[All Clear. Proceed]
[Congratulations on your Sydney gottlieb ethics in STEM award! The bonus should show up in your account by Monday!]
Oh boy a promotion!
Same answer: The hubris of man.
A version of this came out of a DND campaign. They’re called octen. Like oxen, but octen. They’re like regular oxen, except they have eight legs. The legs have the same fur and color as cattle legs, but then bend up and move like a tarantula’s.
Same way we all created the sun, and built a house next to it as children. All without picking up a hammer. Lazy kids.
Yes and no. Going from a design to production takes remarkably little time these days.
So you just scan his picture of an octophant and print it out and it exists? I’d bet you have a bunch of meat and no life. That said, please spend the time and effort into something more productive instead of a octophant was the point
That said, please spend the time and effort into something more productive
Like curing antibiotic-resistant bacterial diseases? Because that’s what the experiment was for.
An octophant is a bacterial disease? Lol
And yes this experiment may be an absolutely stupid thing to do. Could it work out in a extremely well regulated extremely tight secure facility, sure.
Is that happening, not in the U.S., we are cutting all the regulations and health precautions, so if what they create ever kills good bacteria as well during the tests, you should assume it will be spreading to the population.
Why wasn’t it contained? Our research grants were cut in half so we skipped on the precautions. Also the regulatory board no longer exists, and our OSHA equivalent hasn’t stopped by in over 2 years. I think they may have shut down
Mine was called Strandaglend and added tempera to the medium. Sometimes I forget the middle name of relatives but never of my creation 42 years ago.
Yes and no. Going from a design to production takes remarkably little time these days.
Are there commercial virus-printing services? If so, what keeps some yahoo from sending them the virus-equivalent of a .stl file for smallpox? Can someone just order virulent pathogens printed on command?
Assuming that it will work from the first try
I mean, it’s a known process.
There’s a YouTube channel called Thought Emporium.
The guy used to do live streams were he designed custom DNA, and then ordered it from a lab that could produce it.
It was a simple commercial transaction.
I used to work in a wet lab. Agree, designing or multiplying DNA is not a problem. The problem is to make it stable and do what you intend it to do. This could be done only by allowing ai to control the whole process with minimal human interaction
Why go for the cures right?
That’s literally what a bacteriophage is.
For the uninitiated, the scientists created bacteriophages, viruses that eat bacteria and are being studied as a way to cure bacterial diseases without using antibiotics. Non-paywalled article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/06/safety-fears-as-scientists-make-first-viruses-designed-by-ai
For real. I hate AI but people need to read the damn article.
Sorry, but the anti-AI movement is about as well informed as the anti-vax and flat-earth movement.
I am pro-AI and yet fully agree it needs to be ethically and responsibly used and regulated. Data super-centers bad, Grok bad, ChatGPT bad, etc.
I have even seen people say “LLMs can only be chatbots and all chatbots are bad!” Not understanding that this type of research, as well as weather prediction, and animal behaviour studies, all use LLMs.
And every time I’ve attempted to broach the subject, I’ve been accused of being an OpenAI fanboy, etc.
The “anti-AI movement” is just most people on earth, so of course there’s millions of stupid people them.
The pro AI people are the odd ones out, like my boss who vibe coded a task planner and then showed it to us and told us to use AI to develop our complex app faster, as if it isn’t built into every IDE nowadays and he is some genius who just needs to tell the stupid nerds how things work. Just a reeeally special bunch of people.
So you advocate for using AI to develop new drugs? Study weather patterns? Assist in physics and material sciences? Assist with coding? Are you saying pro-AI people think all AI should be embraced at every level, and replace humans?
Did you rely on AI to help you understand my comment?
The point is that calling it an “anti-AI movement”, is like saying there’s an anti shit eating movement. Yes, there are some weirdos being an exception, but apart from that it’s just humanity as a whole.
And I reject that premise entirely, which is why I asked directly whether or not you supported the usage of AI I listed. Because from what I have seen, people who reject AI do so wholesale, with no regard to how it is being used. That’s what I mean by the Anti-AI movement, not that you have a club and meetings.
I am not defending your bosses use of AI to vibecode, but that has absolutely nothing to do with what OP posted.
So are you condemning an entire technology and field of research on the grounds of the worst examples, or do you support the usage of AI in the fields I mentioned?
X is what I mean by Y, not Y
Since we’re rejecting premises, logic rejects this premise. And I reject the premise of me guiding you to a place where it makes sense. Just talk to Grok instead, it will give you the positive affirmation you seek.
pro-ai people are either already delusional, or they are corporate executives which categorically position them to be a priori delusional to ever land in such a job position.
Pro-AI folks are useless in the thinking department, so of course they want to force it into everything - to lay off folks, to cut costs on security and quality, and to generate short-term profits and then fuck off once the bubble inevitably buckles under the weight of reality.
Okay, then you don’t actually understand my position at all. Would you rather tell me what I believe, and reinforce my assertion that you’re misinformed. Or would you like to actually understand my position, and destroy the strawman that you have built?
Agreed. Not only uninformed but also irrational.
So what? I eat bacteria all the time.
Umbrella Corporation is coming along nicely, I guess?
“Grok. Engineer me a highly infectious virus. Optimize it to have high lethality to ethnic groups other than my own, but low lethality to my own ethnic group.”
This world is cursed.
It’s the plot of utopia.
Pretty soon it’ll be like “The Stand”.
“My AI created a virus that cures all autoimmune diseases!”
*squint* “this is just HIV”
Why the fuck would they give it that ability? Oh right, to kill people. Thanks US government.
It’s a bacteriophage, a proposed replacement for antibiotics. It cannot hurt you, it is meant to save your life in the future.
Lmao.
And you think the country responsible for untold death and destruction, that’s lead by war criminal pedophile rapists, isn’t working on super viruses secretly as well?
I didn’t say that. I said THIS research is specifically good because it is set to replace antibiotics, which have a well-known expiration date. I can celebrate medical advances without condoning governments that may use the discoveries for evil. Are you of the position that any technology with the capacity to harm should be banned? Or, what is the alternative research method you’re proposing?
My proposal is sanctioning America out of existence, forced disarmament, and balkanization. You cannot be trusted, as history shows again and again.
You? Do you think I’m an American?
They*
Fair.
Would this identical research be acceptable then, had it come from a different nation?
AI is a synthetic virus.
That graphic looks like the cover of an O’Reilly book
Well, this IS an important milestone towards curea for many illnesses and problems, and yes, this is a field where AI could actually accel and be a great tool
I have a long list of issues with AI, but this ain’t on it.
I guess you mean excel, not accel
Uh, yeah - ‘cause mega ebola will be fun.
I mean fire was one of the first researched technologies and to this day man made fires kill people – but still I think we agree learning how to make fire has been a net positive for humanity.
Well, maybe not, but what I do believe that if fire is a net benefit for society, then in a similar fashion future technologies have and will be. People will always use the best technology available to them to do evil things – but that’s just the other side of the coin of using the best technology available to do good things.
Ebola isn’t a bacteriophage. Do you understand what this research actually does? I’m not trying to be rude, but fear about this can only be spawned from not understanding what a bacteriophage is, what it does, and how it does it.
Maybe use AI to fix your dreadful grammar.
The first physical computer virus
See? People still want physical media!
