This will end poorly.
These aren’t just any viruses, mind you: Omnii-1, the AI model publicly unveiled by Radical Numerics this week, was used to design viable bacteriophages, a type of virus that specifically infects bacteria.
Clickbait title
If it’s making fucking phages I’m all for it.
“Receives” clues you into that it was part of medical treatment, but I can see you how would read it as clickbait, but I honesly don’t think it was intended to be so.
Considering the epigraph being
Not to kill the human, of course – to kill the antibiotic-resistant bacteria causing their infection
It does definitely seem intended
Great, but what about mutation? How stable are bacteriophages? Oh, yeah, it doesn’t matter because the transcribing proteins (in the host cell) cause errors that cause the mutations.
Wee… Resident Evil speed run.
True, but it is news that should give us all pause. Imagine what they could do with AI+CRISPR gene editing, which is also a virus. Probably not something good.
Oh, I’m sure they’re smirking at the military applications of such horrors.
Brilliant. As antibiotics becomes useless, those bacteriophages will be next major medical tools.
I’m excited to see what they can do
Yep the only reason modern medicine went the antibiotic route instead of the bacteriophage route was the logistical and clinical challenges in stocking 100 treatments for an infection instead of 1 (or thousands instead of dozens) but now that we can print them on demand, you just have to show the AI an infectious agent or tumor cell and it can just crank out a custom virus that kills it specifically. Won’t help with infectious prions or viruses but opens the door to new treatments for those too
now that we can print them on demand, you just have to show the AI an infectious agent or tumor cell and it can just crank out a custom virus that kills it specifically.
That’s some Star Trek level bullshit.
We’re slowly but surely making each of the Star Trek technologies. Some of them like the teleporters with a “Heisenberg compensator” component are a little out there of course!
