I have many thoughts… 
phiX174 is an extensively studied and well understood virus, and only has around 5,400 base pairs and 11 genes, according to Nature.
After probing the AI model, the team came up with 302 virus designs. The best way to test them, the researchers figured, was to print, or chemically assemble, all of them and unleash them on real strains of E. Coli.
As it turned out, some of them worked. Once inserted into the poor waiting germs, 16 of the AI-designed viruses successfully infected their hosts by inserting their DNA, hijacking the bacteria to start cranking out copies of themselves, and then burst through the cell’s body, killing it
So they had a computer jumble up a bunch of different sequences of a minuscule viral genome and whoop-de-do some of them were still functional. These articles are all the same and all so tedious.
Why would you 3d print viruses an LLM made
What about that sounds like it should happen in real life and not the opening to some 2nd rate The Stand style scifi dystopia
would you 3d print a car an LLM made?
stop genome piracy
From the paper, they didn’t use an LLM model, but a specific model trained on genomic sequences that uses the same techniques as LLMs for structuring/training. That’s pretty distinct from ChatGPT in practice.
Can’t wait to be killed by the little pixel flipping things from Conway’s game of life
Microscopic versions of the dick monsters from Spore, but they’re AI-generated strains of novel coronavirus
can’t wait to read about how this is fake / wildly exaggerated in a week
I read about it a bit ago, I don’t think it’s fake but it’s not “ai-generated”. Basically the model is given a bunch of data, and due to it not having like a humans bias of what a virus is supposed to look like to be stable, it comes up with bizarre variations of an existing strain that wouldn’t likely be thought up of without being able to look at, and process, all the data at the same time. Some of those variations ended up being stable, which surprised the researchers.
This is my recollection of a sub stack on it I read a week or two ago.
This also isn’t that surprising, this is the thing models are good at. Analyzing raw data.
it is kinda what they do right? take a bunch of data, and throw shit at the wall to see what sticks statistics-wise. it shouldn’t be THAT surprising that some of the viruses ended up being stable
Yeah exactly. It’s cool actually, the problem with AI is that grifters run the show in the US versus anything wrong with the tech itself
Scientists don’t use AI, they use machine learning techniques to see if it can do something they were doing by hand more efficiently. If a scientist says they used AI, they are either lying or attempting to dishonestly win grant money, and neither is acceptable. Something called AI has no place in science. Not saying don’t have thoughts about this, but a pop sci article isn’t going to have sufficiently rigorous information to help anyone form a sufficiently informed opinion about pretty much any actual piece of scientific literature. I have also seen scientists waste many hundreds more good compute hours doing bad statistics with too large a data set or with a python script that breaks at the end of running to truly bad mouth attempts at using ML methods. It’s not particularly more irresponsible in and of itself than thoughtless and wasteful high throughput computing already is.
I’m still waiting for scientist on one to produce strains of yeast making morphine/cocaine/ld, probably could single handedly kill all cartels and cia money machines
Calling in sick to work because I got the kind of flu that just pumps you fill of Dilaudid.
Beating the common cold by making a virus that causes your body to secrete Robitussin
But if my body secretes it how can I taste the delicious purple flavor of Dimetapp?
That’s just one more thing
wants to take away from us
Maybe they did produce such strains already but we don’t and never will know about it because that:
could single handedly kill all cartels and cia money machines
Do you watch Thought Emporium by chance? Dude goes into a lot of detail about gene editing pretty interesting. He once genetically modified his guts to temporarily cure his lactose intolerance. He’s also working on making yeast that produces large quantities of spider silk.
i think i saw spider silk one, somewhat neat.
You’ll have to wait until the distant future of 2015
ah
but the yield is so low, gotta pump those numbers up
how many fingers will this new life have
I’ve read somewhere about the unlimited terror of reverse-chiral life. Basically all molecules in life will be left-handed or right-handed - mirrors of each other. All life on Earth has the same chirality for all molecules, but scientists could now theoretically create opposite-chiral life which is incompatible with Earth’s biosphere. Bacteria that cannot be preyed on by any virus and which cannot be killed by immune system bacteriocide proteins because they don’t match the key to the lock any more.
It’s always off from possible as they’d need to create life from “scratch” from synthesized reverse chiral molecules.
Time to 3d print some viruses. I have had some ideas for new diseases and it is time to make that a reality. I think I can make a new COVID. Maybe start riffing with an ATCGAGGGCAATAAGCA. Seems like a good starting point.
