These aren’t just any viruses, mind you: Omnii-1, the AI model publicly unveiled by Radical Numerics this week, was used to design viable bacteriophages, a type of virus that specifically infects bacteria.

Clickbait title

True, but it is news that should give us all pause. Imagine what they could do with AI+CRISPR gene editing, which is also a virus. Probably not something good.

"Receives" clues you into that it was part of medical treatment, but I can see you how would read it as clickbait, but I honesly don't think it was intended to be so.

Brilliant. As antibiotics becomes useless, those bacteriophages will be next major medical tools.

Yep the only reason modern medicine went the antibiotic route instead of the bacteriophage route was the logistical and clinical challenges in stocking 100 treatments for an infection instead of 1 (or thousands instead of dozens) but now that we can print them on demand, you just have to show the AI an infectious agent or tumor cell and it can just crank out a custom virus that kills it specifically. Won't help with infectious prions or viruses but opens the door to new treatments for those too

Considering the epigraph being

Not to kill the human, of course – to kill the antibiotic-resistant bacteria causing their infection

It does definitely seem intended

now that we can print them on demand, you just have to show the AI an infectious agent or tumor cell and it can just crank out a custom virus that kills it specifically.

That's some Star Trek level bullshit.

We're slowly but surely making each of the Star Trek technologies. Some of them like the teleporters with a "Heisenberg compensator" component are a little out there of course!

I'm excited to see what they can do

Great, but what about mutation? How stable are bacteriophages? Oh, yeah, it doesn’t matter because the transcribing proteins (in the host cell) cause errors that cause the mutations.

Wee… Resident Evil speed run.

Oh, I’m sure they’re smirking at the military applications of such horrors.

This will end poorly.

If it’s making fucking phages I’m all for it.

I'm not sure if I prefer AI -> T-Virus or AI -> SkyNet.

Either way, this reality is burned...

Days most clickbait title goes to...

Do you want zombies? Because this is how you get zombies!

I was already about to say “go watch some more movies” and then your comment finished with a movie reference :D

Only took about 22 years for PADDs to iPads