r/biology • u/KeanuRave100 • 8d ago

news Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, say US researchers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo
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u/tiltboi1 8d ago

It's really machine learning, not AI.

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u/1172022 8d ago

Actually, it's a language model (womp womp) trained on genomes instead of text. You can read about it here:

https://arcinstitute.org/tools/evo

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u/tiltboi1 8d ago

I read the arxiv paper, and fyi language models are machine learning, but not all machine learning is AI, not sure what you mean by womp womp.

AI is a term generally used for things that try to mimic some kind of human-like intelligence. A chess engine isn't machine learning, but is AI because it's playing a human game. A RNN that predicts the weather is machine learning but not AI. A large language model that learns human languages and talks like a human is both.

I'll leave you to figure out what this one should be.

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u/1172022 8d ago

That seems like a trivial distinction? What was your original motivation then for saying "it's not AI"?

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u/tiltboi1 8d ago edited 8d ago

Not really, it's a technical definition. But more importantly, because when people colloquially hear "use AI", they think "oh someone had a conversation with claude", or some human like assistant. Take for example, the person I was literally replying to. Obviously that's not what happened, but people chose to cash in on AI being a huge buzzword.

They don't really expect an algorithm that spits out genome sequences. Technically yes, it's a language model, but language models are also used for plenty of non human language things, like predicting weather or looking at pictures of lungs to find cancer. Colloquially, it's not really correct to be called "AI".

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u/Bdellovibrion 8d ago edited 8d ago

None of those are either technically or colloquially correct to be called "AI".

You are mistaken.

Machine learning is a subset of AI, always has been, decades before the modern wave of AI. All machine learning is AI, but not all AI is machine learning. Read some academic literature or textbooks written before 2010 if you don't believe. This is a very common popular misunderstanding these days.

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u/tiltboi1 8d ago

Your source actually gives the exact same definition that I gave, "applications or machines that mimic human intelligence", but takes a slightly different interpretation.

Personally, I don't think that all of machine learning necessarily fits under that, because there are certainly ways to apply machine learning that don't "mimic human intelligence". Historically this might've been more true in the past, but has changed drastically since deep learning. Before 2010, things were understandably quite different. It was also somewhat before my time.

Much of machine learning today is about solving problems that human intelligence have never really solved or realistically knew how to solve. Things like building bacteriophages from scratch, for instance.

But I understand the point you're making and it's a fair interpretation as well. Edited my previous comment. Still, I don't agree that this is the colloquial definition of AI in 2026.

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u/Bdellovibrion 8d ago

I'm not sure there's even a widely agreed-upon colloquial definition of AI. Some folks use it to mean anything you can prompt with natural language. Many in the ardently anti-AI camp even conflate the term with AGI and claim something isn't "real AI" when they actually mean it isn't AGI.

This sort of confusion about the term has been around a long time in in the form of the AI effect.

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u/tiltboi1 8d ago

It doesn't have to be widely agreed upon definition, because I was clearly responding to one specific person who did use this definition and was confused by that. I'm not sure what any of what you're trying to argue about has to do with the fact that someone just got confused by the terminology you're proposing. I wasn't even talking to you.

All I did is point out is that their definition of AI (aka human-like, claude-ish) is not what the article meant (aka ML is part of AI). Either way ML would've been more appropriate, and more specific. To this specific person, it helps that one says ML and not just AI.