Going Viral

Ignorant people are panicking over a BBC article from August 6th: Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory…The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people…The technology works similarly to large language models…which predict sequences of text…[but] Evo1 and Evo2…were trained on genetic codes from viruses, bacteria, plants and people…then refined to produce a type of virus, known as a bacteriophage, which infect only specific species of bacteria…Stanford researchers picked the most promising 302 [computer] designs and synthesised them in the lab. Of these, 16 proved effective at killing E. coli bacteria…Developing new phage could lead to new ways of treating infections that have become resistant to antibiotics… If technologists and reporters don’t want the ignorant majority to freak out when machine learning systems are used to do something they are…