Pretty soon it’ll be like “The Stand”.
Why the fuck would they give it that ability? Oh right, to kill people. Thanks US government.
oh the progress
Umbrella Corporation is coming along nicely, I guess?
The title is misleading. It wasn’t an LLM, but a bespoke, dedicated system.
And yes, I know that’s sort of “AI,” but these days when that word is used, the average person equates it to ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever text chatbot they’re familiar with.
This basically has nothing to do with that. Scientists have been making models for design and data synthesis forever.
It was an LLM trained on mountains of research.
I don’t think so. I don’t have access to the research, but almost assuredly it is a custom neural network for specifically things like this. An LLM would never be able to describe in detail the virus to a point that researchers would be able to fabricate it. That’s just not how that works.
Technically, not misleading. It’s that LLMs are not AI. The world is misleading! Title is actuate!
That’s objectively false. LLMs are neural networks, which is a form of AI.
AI is a massive umbrella, under which LLMs are categorized.
Don’t fucking post images of headlines.
Find a source that isn’t paywalled and link to the article. Or don’t post anything at all.
Or fuck off? Like is it harder to read in a picture? Want me to clean your screen, wipe your ass too?
People who aren’t illiterate actually read articles. You post the information about the article so that people know if they want to read it or not. Then we discuss the contents of the article with other assholes who also read the article.
Because discussing with others who have also only read the blurb is fucking useless because nobody knows a fucking thing.
Posting the article link both makes it easy to facilitate this while also maintaining the polite fiction that the other dumbasses could have at least in theory read the article.
You are posting here but you have no fucking idea what the fucking point of such forums is because you are an illiterate child and then you have the nerve to get angry. You don’t have to provide a link… you don’t have to make a post either you could leave that task to the actual adults.
Also the culture of posting such pictures results in trivial fakes blending in because idiots judge the veracity of the source pictured without any way to authenticate unlike a fucking url.
Please have my child
🥇gold
Yeah fuck people who use screen readers and/or are broke hahaha what losers.
/s in case it’s needed
Pictures are not reliable sources for information. It promotes a culture of disinformation.
And blind people can’t read words in images.
There, a link to the source of the picture… https://bsky.app/profile/financialtimes.com/post/3msgnagdoh72l you can now bathe in more pixels
Site doesn’t load
Nah, you dont even whip the shit off your own chin after eating all that
Well, this IS an important milestone towards curea for many illnesses and problems, and yes, this is a field where AI could actually accel and be a great tool
I have a long list of issues with AI, but this ain’t on it.
Uh, yeah - ‘cause mega ebola will be fun.
Ebola isn’t a bacteriophage. Do you understand what this research actually does? I’m not trying to be rude, but fear about this can only be spawned from not understanding what a bacteriophage is, what it does, and how it does it.
Maybe use AI to fix your dreadful grammar.
I’m guessing it created it the same way i created a giant eight limbed creature called an Octophant, using a piece of paper and a pencil.
It does not make it exist.
According to this non-paywalled article, it created thousands of potential genomes from which the scientists running the experiment chose three hundred promising candidates. They then had bacteria make those and used them for their bacteriophagy experiment. So essentially the AI made the blueprints that the scientists then turned into real stuff.
So the AI’s role in all this, given that creating new viruses in a lab is already understood and well-practiced, was just to generate a list of virus configuration options (presumably working from existing examples), from which scientists had to discard ~90% of what the AI generated before moving on to the next step.
Sounds like an attempt at a headline more than a genuine scientific effort.
So the AI’s role in this process, which is already known and well-practiced,
Uh… no? Creating custom-made genomes for curing specific diseases isn’t “known and well-practiced;” it’s an area of active research.
from which scientists had to discard ~90% of what the AI generated before moving on to the next step.
That’s basically in line with how AI is used in similar applications; even if most of what you get is busts AI can make so much stuff that it can compete with (or even outdo) other alternatives by sheer quantity. Sure someone has to filter out the useful stuff from the trash, but the very fact that it produces useful stuff makes it worth it. This method is well-established in other areas, so there’s no reason to dismiss it here.
Let’s get real here. Could the bacteria make my Octophant if I clean up the pencil lines?!
Cat girls first dangit! Get in line.
Unfortunately the science hasn’t gotten that far yet, but maybe in the future.
Same question to you, why would you do this?
Consider the military and industrial applications of the octophant.
[You Have Been Reported to the Raytheon Ethics Board]
Oh boy a promotion!
[All Clear. Proceed]
[Congratulations on your Sydney gottlieb ethics in STEM award! The bonus should show up in your account by Monday!]
Same answer: The hubris of man.
A version of this came out of a DND campaign. They’re called octen. Like oxen, but octen. They’re like regular oxen, except they have eight legs. The legs have the same fur and color as cattle legs, but then bend up and move like a tarantula’s.
Mine was called Strandaglend and added tempera to the medium. Sometimes I forget the middle name of relatives but never of my creation 42 years ago.
Same way we all created the sun, and built a house next to it as children. All without picking up a hammer. Lazy kids.
Yes and no. Going from a design to production takes remarkably little time these days.
So you just scan his picture of an octophant and print it out and it exists? I’d bet you have a bunch of meat and no life. That said, please spend the time and effort into something more productive instead of a octophant was the point
That said, please spend the time and effort into something more productive
Like curing antibiotic-resistant bacterial diseases? Because that’s what the experiment was for.
An octophant is a bacterial disease? Lol
And yes this experiment may be an absolutely stupid thing to do. Could it work out in a extremely well regulated extremely tight secure facility, sure.
Is that happening, not in the U.S., we are cutting all the regulations and health precautions, so if what they create ever kills good bacteria as well during the tests, you should assume it will be spreading to the population.
Why wasn’t it contained? Our research grants were cut in half so we skipped on the precautions. Also the regulatory board no longer exists, and our OSHA equivalent hasn’t stopped by in over 2 years. I think they may have shut down
Yes and no. Going from a design to production takes remarkably little time these days.
Are there commercial virus-printing services? If so, what keeps some yahoo from sending them the virus-equivalent of a .stl file for smallpox? Can someone just order virulent pathogens printed on command?
Assuming that it will work from the first try
I mean, it’s a known process.
There’s a YouTube channel called Thought Emporium.
The guy used to do live streams were he designed custom DNA, and then ordered it from a lab that could produce it.
It was a simple commercial transaction.
I used to work in a wet lab. Agree, designing or multiplying DNA is not a problem. The problem is to make it stable and do what you intend it to do. This could be done only by allowing ai to control the whole process with minimal human interaction
Why go for the cures right?
That’s literally what a bacteriophage is.
For the uninitiated, the scientists created bacteriophages, viruses that eat bacteria and are being studied as a way to cure bacterial diseases without using antibiotics. Non-paywalled article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/06/safety-fears-as-scientists-make-first-viruses-designed-by-ai
So what? I eat bacteria all the time.
For real. I hate AI but people need to read the damn article.
Sorry, but the anti-AI movement is about as well informed as the anti-vax and flat-earth movement.
I am pro-AI and yet fully agree it needs to be ethically and responsibly used and regulated. Data super-centers bad, Grok bad, ChatGPT bad, etc.
I have even seen people say “LLMs can only be chatbots and all chatbots are bad!” Not understanding that this type of research, as well as weather prediction, and animal behaviour studies, all use LLMs.
And every time I’ve attempted to broach the subject, I’ve been accused of being an OpenAI fanboy, etc.
The “anti-AI movement” is just most people on earth, so of course there’s millions of stupid people them.
The pro AI people are the odd ones out, like my boss who vibe coded a task planner and then showed it to us and told us to use AI to develop our complex app faster, as if it isn’t built into every IDE nowadays and he is some genius who just needs to tell the stupid nerds how things work. Just a reeeally special bunch of people.
So you advocate for using AI to develop new drugs? Study weather patterns? Assist in physics and material sciences? Assist with coding? Are you saying pro-AI people think all AI should be embraced at every level, and replace humans?
Did you rely on AI to help you understand my comment?
The point is that calling it an “anti-AI movement”, is like saying there’s an anti shit eating movement. Yes, there are some weirdos being an exception, but apart from that it’s just humanity as a whole.
pro-ai people are either already delusional, or they are corporate executives which categorically position them to be a priori delusional to ever land in such a job position.
Pro-AI folks are useless in the thinking department, so of course they want to force it into everything - to lay off folks, to cut costs on security and quality, and to generate short-term profits and then fuck off once the bubble inevitably buckles under the weight of reality.
Okay, then you don’t actually understand my position at all. Would you rather tell me what I believe, and reinforce my assertion that you’re misinformed. Or would you like to actually understand my position, and destroy the strawman that you have built?
Agreed. Not only uninformed but also irrational.
“Grok. Engineer me a highly infectious virus. Optimize it to have high lethality to ethnic groups other than my own, but low lethality to my own ethnic group.”
This world is cursed.
It’s the plot of utopia.
That graphic looks like the cover of an O’Reilly book
We’re getting Lucifer Alpha before GTA 6. The future is stupid!
This is a proposed replacement for antibiotics, it cannot hurt. Your body contains more bacteriophages than human cells and bacteria combined.
Everyone kept enjoying dystopian media they thought they’d bring it into real life
The first physical computer virus
See? People still want physical media!
AI is a synthetic virus.
Ehh this is a milestone. If you can engineer a virus you can also engineer a cure.
This virus IS the cure. You need to look up what a bacteriophage is. It physically cannot infect you the same way HIV or any other virus you know of does.
Was actually thinking the same lol
We wouldn’t have to engineer a cure if we didn’t engineer the T-Virus to begin with.
This virus IS a cure for bacterial infections. It is a proposed replacement for antibiotics, which have been steadily reducing in effectiveness over the years, and will likely stop working entirely in the future. This is a way to prevent you and I from being killed by staph infections again.
Not really though, a virus is just a vector for introducing a message into a living cell so a virus CAN be a cure in and of itself. I would also bet that the “AI” they used is actually just a ML algorithm but the internet needed clicks so they slapped “AI” on it.
It was actually a LLM trained on very specific data. In this case, bacteriophage research. LLMs are not just chatbots.
Refusing to engage with the technology just guarantees that when someone else inevitably engineers a virus you’ll be unable to do anything about it
