AI is now making new viruses

What could possibly go wrong? Did we learn nothing from sci-fi? A study published in Science (via The New York Times) details how researchers used an AI model to design new viruses capable of infecting and reproducing inside bacteria. The good news: they took appropriate precautions, and their work could lead to breakthroughs in gene therapy and biotechnology. The bad news: the next guys might not be so generous. Scientists at Palo Alto's Arc Institute and Stanford University created the viruses with the genome language models Evo 1 and Evo 2. They work somewhat like large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT or Claude. Except instead of being trained on books and websites, they studied genetic sequences. The project trained its models on trillions of nucleotides (the building blocks of