AI designs genomes from scratch & outperforms virologists at lab work. Dr Richard Moulange asks: what could go wrong?

Richard Moulange: What the team were able to do was they had the base Evo 2 model, and then they fine-tuned it on what are called bacteriophages — so these are viruses that eat, that kill bacteria — fine-tuned it on something like 15,000 of those, and then started prompting it with the beginnings of known bacteriophage genomes to see if they can make new ones. So this is again akin to, with LLMs, you say, “Write me a story about this kind of topic” — I don’t know, a murder mystery — and then...