Scientists Used OpenAI To Create 16 New Viruses Not Seen In Nature But Will This Hurt More Than Help? – AfroTech
There is a significant development in AI and the study of viruses.
Scientists from Stanford University and the Arc Institute used AI to create new viruses, CNN reports. This has never been done before. Samuel King, a graduate student at Stanford University and an author of the new study, views the medical milestone as an “obvious next step.” According to The New York Times, scientists used an AI model called EVO — created by OpenAI — to analyze millions of DNA from animals, plants, microbes and viruses. Once it understood genetic patterns, researchers used EVO to create synthetic viruses.
Jacob Ward, a CNN contributor and tech journalist, told CNN that AI has dramatically accelerated a process that might otherwise take a lifetime.
“We have all kinds of bacterial infections you can catch out of hospitals that current medicines really cannot fight. And part of the problem is the incredible trial and error it takes to figure out what materials in nature might be the basis of a new antibiotic. In this case, what you’ve got is basically all of that trial and error collapsed into the kind of efficiency that AI, you know, is always sold on,” Ward told CNN. “So we have these scientists who might have spent years, a lifetime trying to figure out are there any viruses in nature that could conceivably kill these bacteria in a Petri dish. Instead, they could use AI, pull in some data, build three hundred or so new viruses. Sixteen of them come alive, and the work is more or less finished and published. That is an incredibly fast development process for a thing that we could really use in the future.”
The 16 new viruses bear genetic similarities to the Phi X-174 virus, which only infects bacteria, so they are not expected to pose a threat to humans, according to The New York Times.
This new AI use case has raised some concerns. In a commentary that accompanied the initial study published in Science, researchers wrote:
“Although this is promising for life sciences applications, it also raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions. The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.”
The researchers noted that safety measures and guardrails should be in place as AI technology continues to advance.
