Who needs Wuhan and what could possibly go wrong?

[wtg]

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

It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI.

The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people.

The breakthrough has been labelled a "very significant turning point" in science that could unlock a new era for treating disease. But experts have also warned AI-designed viruses raise "urgent" safety and security concerns.

AI tools are rapidly advancing and have already been used to design new antibiotics.

But that is relatively simple compared with designing a new viable virus from scratch.

"This is a next step in the complexity that's designable by generative AI, this is the first time generative AI has been used to design a complete genome, it's something that can replicate and have other functions inside cells… this was new territory for us," Brian Hie, assistant professor at Stanford University, told the BBC.

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

[CHAS]

That is not particularly comforting.

[jon-nyc]

When Anthropic first released Fable 5, they were worried about what it might be able to do if put into the wrong hands. So they stopped answering all biology related queries until they could put some guardrails on it. I saw that someone asked it the simplest question like "mitochondria is the power plant of the cell, right?' and it wouldn't respond. Eventually they got it to redirect to a less capable model when certain topics arose.