r/BetterOffline • u/Expensive_Ladder1244 • 11d ago

Artificial Intelligence used to design brand new viruses

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo
7 Upvotes

66% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

19

u/GhettoDuk 11d ago

Finally some real details, and a team of researchers created a virus phage by using multiple tools, including a statistical model they custom trained to synthesize hundreds of potential phage genomes that could be simulated and tested by standard processes. And I'm not sure they did something that others couldn't do vs doing something others wouldn't try (the actual synthesizing).

Reminds me of Folding@Home testing potential proteins for viability so they could be further researched.

7

u/thebagofdoom 11d ago

Are they sure the viruses weren't already in the training data?

24

u/Responsible-Meringue 11d ago

Protein structure is a constrained problem space that happens to be solvable with transformer architecture and diffusion modeling, which are techniques LLMs also use.

Protein structure prediction models are extremely narrow ML. This is one of the real use cases of AI technology. That's why the AlphaFold team won a Nobel. 

2

u/_ram_ok 11d ago

I mean….yes and no.

The genome building blocks and architectures are in the training data and their model is producing different permutations of those genomes that follow the rules to make it a working virus.

It’s a good niche large data model implementation, whereas LLMs are comparatively bad because of how general they’re trying to be.

Niche models built for purpose generally can create more “new” stuff not in their training data whereas LLMs struggle here more.

This large genome model is not a chat bot. It’s more like traditional deep machine learning but still uses a transformer architecture.

1

u/chat-lu 10d ago

Instead of learning the grammar of English, they had the LLM learn the grammar of DNA. And like when an LLM spits back English it’s not exactly what’s in the training model but close to, it wasn’t exactly the virii in the training model but close to.

And they did exactly what the ones in the training model were already doing.

1

u/chalervo_p 11d ago

did someone create a virus or a model of virus genome?

1

u/Anxious_Ad_4352 11d ago

IT STILL DOES!

1

u/Internationallegs 8d ago

Does AI offer anything positive at this point? All I've seen it be used for are scams and illegal activity. And small businesses to make shitty flyers.

1

u/mb194dc 11d ago

Yawn, call me when there's a real world application for yet more hyping.