I’m guessing it created it the same way i created a giant eight limbed creature called an Octophant, using a piece of paper and a pencil.
It does not make it exist.
Same question to you, why would you do this?
Same answer: The hubris of man.
A version of this came out of a DND campaign. They’re called octen. Like oxen, but octen. They’re like regular oxen, except they have eight legs. The legs have the same fur and color as cattle legs, but then bend up and move like a tarantula’s.
Yes and no. Going from a design to production takes remarkably little time these days.
So you just scan his picture of an octophant and print it out and it exists? I’d bet you have a bunch of meat and no life. That said, please spend the time and effort into something more productive instead of a octophant was the point
Yes and no. Going from a design to production takes remarkably little time these days.
Are there commercial virus-printing services? If so, what keeps some yahoo from sending them the virus-equivalent of a .stl file for smallpox? Can someone just order virulent pathogens printed on command?
Assuming that it will work from the first try
I mean, it’s a known process.
There’s a YouTube channel called Thought Emporium.
The guy used to do live streams were he designed custom DNA, and then ordered it from a lab that could produce it.
It was a simple commercial transaction.
I used to work in a wet lab. Agree, designing or multiplying DNA is not a problem. The problem is to make it stable and do what you intend it to do. This could be done only by allowing ai to control the whole process with minimal human interaction
Mine was called Strandaglend and added tempera to the medium. Sometimes I forget the middle name of relatives but never of my creation 42 years ago.
Don’t fucking post images of headlines.
Find a source that isn’t paywalled and link to the article. Or don’t post anything at all.
Or fuck off? Like is it harder to read in a picture? Want me to clean your screen, wipe your ass too?
People who aren’t illiterate actually read articles. You post the information about the article so that people know if they want to read it or not. Then we discuss the contents of the article with other assholes who also read the article.
Because discussing with others who have also only read the blurb is fucking useless because nobody knows a fucking thing.
Posting the article link both makes it easy to facilitate this while also maintaining the polite fiction that the other dumbasses could have at least in theory read the article.
You are posting here but you have no fucking idea what the fucking point of such forums is because you are an illiterate child and then you have the nerve to get angry. You don’t have to provide a link… you don’t have to make a post either you could leave that task to the actual adults.
Also the culture of posting such pictures results in trivial fakes blending in because idiots judge the veracity of the source pictured without any way to authenticate unlike a fucking url.
🥇gold
Pictures are not reliable sources for information. It promotes a culture of disinformation.
And blind people can’t read words in images.
There, a link to the source of the picture… https://bsky.app/profile/financialtimes.com/post/3msgnagdoh72l you can now bathe in more pixels
Site doesn’t load
Yeah fuck people who use screen readers and/or are broke hahaha what losers.
/s in case it’s needed
Nah, you dont even whip the shit off your own chin after eating all that
“Grok. Engineer me a highly infectious virus. Optimize it to have high lethality to ethnic groups other than my own, but low lethality to my own ethnic group.”
This world is cursed.
It’s the plot of utopia.
“My AI created a virus that cures all autoimmune diseases!”
*squint* “this is just HIV”
AI is a synthetic virus.
This is like watching Contagion from 2011 during the pandemic.
The first physical computer virus
See? People still want physical media!
deleted by creator
Literally my first thought.
You realize your body is host to literally trillions of bacteriaphages right now? “Virus” doesn’t automatically mean universal infecting agent. They need to be calibrated to specific bio-markers. Most bacteriaphages only infect a SINGLE species of bacteria.
And before you mention mutations and cross-species jumps, there is a very big difference between the viruses that infect you and I, and bacteriaphages. There has never, ever, not even one single solitary time, been an instance of a bacteriaphage suddenly mutating to start infecting macro-organisms.
There has never, ever, not even one single solitary time, been an instance of a bacteriaphage suddenly mutating to start infecting macro-organisms.
True and correct. And even modifying towards that isn’t really worthwhile because there’s better delivery mechanisms than bacteriophages for those avenues.
But that doesn’t mean improperly tailored bacteriophagy therapy isn’t a concern for some macro-organisms. Like the kind that tends to operate with biology that is tightly interwoven with microbial life, even to degrees we have not yet fully made in-roads into enough understanding yet. Macro-organisms, like Humans.
They need to be calibrated to specific bio-markers. Most bacteriaphages only infect a SINGLE species of bacteria.
Yes. A real limitation of the approach some might say, especially anything naturally selected for. Wait, did I say might say?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11876824/
Even from the abstract dated two years ago, you should be able to glimpse the fact that there’s multiple approaches under study to circumvent these limits. It is very required if the technology is to live to it’s potential. From nano-particles supplementary structures (with as of yet unknown immune responses), to phage cocktails. A lot of good science that could be easily carried out wrongly in the future, given the right causes or incentives or plain bad luck.
Imagine we get to the vibecoding equivalent of this (I know it seems absurd, but so has everything else)? Epidemics of lactose intolerance, nutrient malabsorption, and mental health crises, because a future FDA went even more…whatever the hell they currently are doing. I want my body’s microbiota to only be subject to my abuses.
Okay, those are fair concerns, and it’s refreshing to see actual founded rebuttals instead of the slack jawed “But science scary!”
True, an improperly built phage could cause some harm. But the goal is to make killers, not modifiers. And most of what you covered is powered by enzymes your body makes, not bacteria in your gut. And worst case scenario, let’s say it does affect some of the microbes that assist in nutrient absorption, the answer to that is to nuke your gut, and get a faecal transplant. Not ideal, but very common.
Could this go awry? Yes, in the ways ALL medical research has the potential to go awry. But this is an objectively positive discovery that is undoubtedly going to save millions, maybe even billions of lives. Antibiotics is something that truly changed the course of our species, but it’s effectiveness is limited, and we’re nearing the end. This is a proposed answer to it, that will prevent you from dying of simple infections.
Demonizing it helps nobody.
Are you a bacterium?
No?
You’re fine
SO WHAT IF I AM?! ARE YOU SAYING BACTERIA-AMERICANS ARE TOO STUPID TO USE THE INTERNET?!
Umbrella Corporation is coming along nicely, I guess?
That graphic looks like the cover of an O’Reilly book
AI SOLVES THE FERMI PARADOX
I wouldn’t say “solves” so much as answers whether our great filter is ahead of us or behind us (it’s the former, btw).
Humans have designed viruses before so ya nothing fermi breaking aqui.
IMO it’s more of a case that there are a ton of great filters, some of which we’ve passed through already, others are still ahead. But all the ones that we’ve previously passed probably mean that intelligent life capable of advanced technology is very rare, possibly even to the point that we’re the only ones in the galaxy.
Bacteriaphages are no more dangerous to complex life than a knife is to single-cellular life.
What? A bacteriophage in your gut could definitely kill you.
bacteriophages only infect bacteria, hence the name. they cant infect eukaryotes, or even things like archaea. also they target specific strains of bacteria, and only the ones that arnt resistant to bacteriaphages.
How? Do you know how they work? What they are? You have literally trillions in your gut right now. There are literally more bacteriaphages inside of you than human cells and bacteria combined.
My thinking was that a novel bacteriophage could potentially clear out the bacteria in your intestines. Seems like natural bacteriophages are all pretty cool with humans, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage
And that phage wouldn’t kill all your gut flora, it would only kill one strain/species at most. Which is just a normal Tuesday for your gut microbiome.
Ah, yes, and that’s why you were asking me how they worked, because I clearly did not. Thanks for the education! I wasn’t expecting to learn about bacteriophages when I woke up this morning.
And thank you for taking the time to fill in your knowledge gaps! I really appreciate the willingness and patience.
it wont, each phage, is only able to infect one species, and even some strains only. theres always evolution arms race between bacteria and viruses, so theres is no virus attacks all bacteria. since more than one species exist in your gut. also it gets complicated if you consider bacteria can become resistant to phage infection, yes it can be overcome.
We really are the dumbest of species, aren’t we?
Are you saying this because researchers made a bacteriaphage? Are you under the assumption that they are, or can be, dangerous to us?
On their own? No of course not. But since when have things that can be weaponized not been weaponized?
Because the only way you could weaponize a bacteriophage is by deciding you want to kill one specific bacteria strain in a person.
You could make a bacteriophage to target my favourite brewers yeast, but selecting a single strain of ecoli in my gut wouldn’t harm me any more than eating a giant bowl of extra-extra-spicy salsa.
They don’t have the same mechanisms as other viruses. They physically cannot harm eukaryotes.
Again. At this interval, they’re not a threat per se. But this development isn’t going to stop at this interval.
So you understand what a bacteriophage is? You’re effectively arguing that they are going to weaponize string cheese just because “That’s what they do.” The entire premise is nonsense, unless you have no idea what a bacteriophage is, or how it works.
yup yup yuppers
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does it actually exist or is it a “simulation” again
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we’ve been using ai for decades, just not like the llm ai
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This is a really good piece of news because it shows that you can do something meaningful, that benefits humanity, with AI.
These viri have been created to combat certain diseases using and building upon scientific knowledge already out there in the public domain.
Medicine is going to evolve at an astounding rate.
I do not think we need to build more DCs though.
Great, so we’re gonna keep the Boomers alive for longer. I can’t wait until our governments are run by 110 year olds.
Wow talk about negative outlook. I hope you do something meaningful with your life.
I already have and consistently do.
Keeping older people suffering longer is not a good thing. I’m all for medical advancements to keep a 5yo from dying of cancer, but we don’t need to keep someone who can barely walk and get around on their own in their 90s alive for another 30 years. It’s a drain on medical resources, tax revenue, social programs, etc. What does a 110yo person contribute to society as a whole? Nothing.
I’m 39 years old. I do not want to live to be 110 and feel like a drain on not only society but my family. Once I get to the point in life I can no longer piss without a family member helping me to the bathroom, just push my ass off the balcony.
Negative outlook
👍
When I’m old and falling apart, I’d rather have a humane assisted suicide option be socially acceptable instead of an excruciating death by random chance. The rich and powerful are always going to live longer but maybe less at risk populations (read: poor, minority, children) will die from negligence
This isn’t meant to keep people alive for longer than we currently do, this is an attempt to replace antibiotics, which have a very real and well understood effectiveness period that we are nearing the end of.
Or 3d print the agent of the next pandemic.
Ehh this is a milestone. If you can engineer a virus you can also engineer a cure.
This virus IS the cure. You need to look up what a bacteriophage is. It physically cannot infect you the same way HIV or any other virus you know of does.
Was actually thinking the same lol
We wouldn’t have to engineer a cure if we didn’t engineer the T-Virus to begin with.
Not really though, a virus is just a vector for introducing a message into a living cell so a virus CAN be a cure in and of itself. I would also bet that the “AI” they used is actually just a ML algorithm but the internet needed clicks so they slapped “AI” on it.
It was actually a LLM trained on very specific data. In this case, bacteriophage research. LLMs are not just chatbots.
This virus IS a cure for bacterial infections. It is a proposed replacement for antibiotics, which have been steadily reducing in effectiveness over the years, and will likely stop working entirely in the future. This is a way to prevent you and I from being killed by staph infections again.
Refusing to engage with the technology just guarantees that when someone else inevitably engineers a virus you’ll be unable to do anything about it
