Another antidote to AI hype: AI isn't creating viruses from scratch

This is another article in my “Take the antidote” series against AI hype. Read parts one here and two here. We’re going to be using the questions laid out in part one to navigate this story.Earlier in August, the media reported on EVO 2, a GPT (generative pretrained transformer) that is trained on genomes, instead of text, to predict create viable genomes. Like ChatGPT, it is a Transformer-based “generative AI” model; however, since it’s scoped to a single domain, it doesn’t require the mountains of data, electricity, and water that current frontier language models need. EVO is open source and can be run on relatively modest hardware.In previous blog posts, I’ve hailed EVO as a responsible example of what transformers, the machine learning architecture behind LLMs, could be used for. This is a point I’ve expanded on across multiple The Last Enclosure podcast episodes too.[1]1 It was actually surprising to see EVO framed in what I feel is a needlessly fearmongering way. That’s not to…

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