Controversial breakthrough: US researchers use AI to design working viruses for the first time
today.rtl.lu
Scientists have used AI to design functional viruses that target bacteria – a first for the technology, and one that is already raising alarm over biosecurity.
  • fullsquare@awful.systems
    0·
    2 days ago

    first of all, who the fuck calls you a leader. second of all, you fell for a marketing piece, because if you read it you’d figure that what happened is that some model spewed 700000 candidates, that was filtered down to 285 by actual scientists, then when made and tested it had >90% failure rate (16 viable) and all are closely related to existing phage

    “somebody burned square kilometer of rainforest to do phage madlibs” would be more accurate title

    • Carnelian@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 days ago

      They spun up this account a week ago and make a hundred posts a day that are literally all just uncritical pro-AI propaganda pieces preceded by empty negative qualifying statements lol. Basically an AI booster having a laugh trying to drown out legitimate discussion (for some reason they never seem satisfied just existing in their amazing ai utopia while the rest of us get “left behind”, hmm, wonder why that is).

      Hopefully the account is banned in a timely fashion

    • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
      0·
      2 days ago

      This, exactly.

      This press release, like the chain of “our AI broke containment and hacked into the Pentagon and the World Bank, oops!” brags, serves one purpose: to give the impression that the Skynet Singularity is unfolding and that humanity’s only chance for survival is to cannibalise everything else, from regulations protecting the conditions that allow human life to exist to any activity that’s not racing to build the Computer God before someone else does, in a last-ditch hail-Mary effort to head off the apocalypse, also inflating the AI bubble and allowing the grifters who bet that if you pile up enough Nvidia GPUs, run enough terawatts through them and feed them the shreds of the world’s libraries, you can create God and make him your servant to cash out.