'Artificial intelligence" based on large language models (LLM) is shaping up to be the most efficient destroyer of value since the South Sea Bubble. After the crash, some specific functions of AI will eventually turn out to be genuinely revenue-generating, and a lot of jobs will duly disappear. But the biggest winner (and potentially biggest loser) is medical science.
Dr Brian Hie, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California, has just revealed that his team has made the first viruses designed by AI. They are "bacteriophages", viruses that only infect bacteria and are widely used to treat people with infections that resist other treatments.
However, natural bacteriophages sometimes fail, so Dr Hie used generative AI to design new ones that might do the job. The AI generated thousands of designs for new genomes that more or less fit the bill, and he chose around 300 of them to build in the lab. It's hard work, not magic, but he ended up with 16 "novel" bacteriophages that might work.
