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AI tool designs mRNA vaccines that are more potent and stable
- PrimeMcFly 4y ago[flagged]
- Vecr 4y agoYeah, this is the kind of thing that Eliezer Yudkowsky is kind of right about. You have a draw a clear line about what advice you are going to be taking from any kind of AI whatsoever, otherwise it's really confusing to people why this time was fine because the AI is not "general" but in some unspecified future time it's not okay. Especially if you want to tell people that some future IA will kill everyone with synthetic biology.
- PrimeMcFly 4y ago> Yeah, this is the kind of thing that Eliezer Yudkowsky is kind of right about. I find it very hard to take him seriously or assign him any credibility with how he acted regarding the whole "Roko's basilisk" thing, not to mention some of his views just seem plain nuts to me.
- Vecr 4y agoI agree, but that does not mean everything he says is wrong. I think the public having clear expectations of AIs and how they interact with them is important in general.
- PrimeMcFly 4y agoBut when he talks about AI, he is talking about artificial consciousnesses, and we are no where even close to creating something like that. I mean I agree having rules and expectations is important though. On the other hand I wonder how enforceable it will be since people can generate models in secret in their homes.
- ben_w 4y ago> But when he talks about AI, he is talking about artificial consciousnesses Yudkowsky may have talked about artificial consciousnesses at various points, but that's not even close to a critical issue for why he's a doomer. The TLDR quote I have of his fear is: “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/499238-the-ai-does-not-hate-you-nor-does-it-love https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/499238-the-ai-does-not-hate...
- skellington 4y agoI have no problem with AI designed vaccines, but you can take it first. ;)
- junon 4y agoHaha because scientists are stupid idiots right? xD
- astrobe_ 4y agoCompanies would never do something unethical - let alone illegal - or put their customers at risk in order to make more profits, right? xD
- junon 4y agoThat wasn't the original argument at all though.
- logicchains 4y agoScientists are smart so they don't bite the hand that's funding them.
- Eumenes 4y agohttps://unherd.com/thepost/the-most-vaccine-hesitant-education-group-of-all-phds/ https://unherd.com/thepost/the-most-vaccine-hesitant-educati...
- newswasboring 4y agoThe AI designed stuff will also go through peer review and testing.
- PrimeMcFly 4y agoOf course it will, but that won't matter to the people against it.
- newswasboring 4y agoYeah. Idiots gonna idiot I guess.
- defrost 4y agoI have no fear of mRNA vaccines nor LLM "AI"'s but I agree with your point that large numbers of people will strongly react to the notion of "AI created gene altering vaccines" etc. The future will clearly be a dystopian hellscape populated by people looking as if drawn by DALL-E. /s
- petesergeant 4y agopopulated by people looking like they’re depicted in the film WALL•E
- kiba 4y ago81% of the population in the US had a covid vaccine.[1] People at some point stop believing the bullshitting. 1. https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
- zmgsabst 4y agoPhrased another way: - 1 in 5 people refused them, entirely. - 1 in 8 who initially accepted them rejected the second; 5 in 8 who initially accepted rejected the third. - In a three round series, approximately 2 in 3 overall rejected them before the full course. I agree people eventually stop accepting bullshit — but we may disagree on what they’re rejecting.
- arcticbull 4y agoI don't know about you but it's pretty difficult to get 81% of any population to do anything. I'd consider this overwhelmingly successful.
- phillc73 4y agoI don’t specifically know about the US experience, but mass covid vaccination didn’t appear to be all that easy to achieve where I live. It required an overwhelming government information campaign, removal of the ability to engage in many activities if unvaccinated, multiple “lockdowns” and the threat of mandating compliance. I almost wonder that anyone managed to get through all of that when refusing the vaccine.
- detrites 4y agoI'd say more than 81% generally comply with the law. Given the extreme measures employed to "get" people to take it, that might be a closer comparison than whatever it is you're imagining comparing this to.
- throwaway71271 4y agoto play devil's advocate: you can get 81% of the population to do a lot of things, when you lock them in their homes, forbid them to see their family or get a coffee or go to work unless they do the thing you want them to do. (i am fully vaccinated, but i wouldn't consider what happened successful in any way)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoThis is an optimization "AI", like a computer chess program, right? It's not determining in advance which kinds of structures are going to be most stable and generating them, it's working toward pre-determined structural optima?
- hiddencost 4y agoAI is usually a marketing term. They used machine learning to learn the topology of a prediction space related to desirable properties of mRNA vaccines.
- jebarker 4y agoI could be wrong, but that makes it sound algorithmically similar to AlphaFold 1 where they used ML to learn properties of the folded protein and then optimized the final structure to fit those properties
- progrus 4y ago[flagged]
- omidHeravi 4y agoit doesn't even have to be "remarkable" anymore to send any one of us into existential spiral
- progrus 4y agoSeek a spiritual advisor who is smart enough to call out your BS. Best advice I’ve got, hope it helps.
- thxg 4y agoThe scientific article seems to be open access [1]. Before people draw links to recent large language model breakthroughs: Although they do use techniques from computational linguistics, there are no neural networks involved. This is more like old-school AI. They have essentially a giant optimization problem, and they (approximately) model it as a lattice parsing problem, with a stochastic context-free grammar. They can solve that to optimality in O(n^3), which is too slow for some applications. So they propose a O(n) heuristic (hence no optimality guarantees, but the model was approximate to begin with anyways, and the heuristic is a lot faster), which is the reason for the name of their code: "LinearDesign". [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06127-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06127-z
- choeger 4y agoMuch appreciated! Do you have a good source on what a lattice parsing problem is?
- shishy 4y ago"The lattice parsing problem refers to the task of parsing a word lattice, which is a graph structure that represents multiple possible sequences of words that could have generated a given speech signal [1]. The word lattice is a weighted directed acyclic graph, where each node represents a word hypothesis and each edge represents a transition between two words. The weights on the edges represent the likelihood of the transition. The goal of lattice parsing is to find the most likely sequence of words that generated the speech signal, given the word lattice [1]. Lattice parsing is a challenging problem because the word lattice can be very large and contain many alternative paths, making it difficult to find the most likely path efficiently [1]. Several techniques have been proposed to address this problem, including bi-directional LR parsing from an anchor word, augmented chart data structure, and attention shifting for parsing speech [2][3][4]." 1. https://doi.org/10.21437/interspeech.2016-1583 https://doi.org/10.21437/interspeech.2016-1583 2. https://doi.org/10.3115/997939.997950 https://doi.org/10.3115/997939.997950 3. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3115/991146.991188 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.3115/991146.991188 4. https://doi.org/10.21236/ada105028 https://doi.org/10.21236/ada105028 ---- (full disclosure this might not be correct, I tried this with an LLM approach we're beta testing at my job called scite Assistant that answers with real references - no hallucinations, just curious how the response is against someone that knows the field a bit more..!)
- disambiguation 4y agoArt and text generated by AI are not eligible for copyright. I wonder if the same would apply to medicine.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y agoCopyright means nothing anymore.
- claritise 4y agoNot sure why this would matter, generally medication is incredibly expensive because of the research that needs to go into it not scaling well to the amount of people that might need it for rare disease. If drug discovery costs go down to almost nothing, and trialling is greatly assisted with AI driven protein folding, it would almost become trivial to cure most diseases.
- b800h 4y agoIn some jurisdictions - I would argue that will blatantly be overturned, as it's a limit on economic activity, and we know what happens to those.
- Gigachad 4y agoWhere are you seeing this? Everything I saw is that they are eligible for copyright, and the copyright is owned by the person who ran the tool and selected the output. The news was dumb media bait where people tried to claim the AI itself owned the copyright which makes no sense since AI is not a legal entity able to own things.
- evolve2k 4y agoJudge declared it about a month ago. Positon was the human edited parts were but machine generated parts were not. Sorry don’t have the reference at hand.
- Gigachad 4y agoSeems almost impossible to enforce. Say I generate an image, then go in photoshop and play with the levels/colors. Every single pixel was modified by me. And the only way you could use it without infringing on my copyright is to work out what the original image was, which is impossible.
- vivekraja 4y agoThis linear-time approximation algorithm for mRNA design (LinearDesign) was inspired a lot from their previous work on a linear-time RNA folding algorithm (LinearFold). We re-wrote their C implementation[0] of LinearFold in Go and added comments to explain how the algorithm worked: https://github.com/allyourbasepair/rbscalculator/blob/main/linearfold/linearfold.go https://github.com/allyourbasepair/rbscalculator/blob/main/l... [0] - https://github.com/LinearFold/LinearFold https://github.com/LinearFold/LinearFold
- dvh 4y agoIs Monte Carlo an AI? I'm asking for a friend.
- moffkalast 4y agoOf course it is. It's artificial and makes intelligent decisions. So is a pile of if sentences if they encode logical reasoning that applies some knowledge. If one had a database of all answers to every question in the universe, making AGI would be as simple as fetch call.
- logicchains 4y agoHopefully these ones will be tested longer than the last batch of mRNA designs, so that risks like the doubling of retinal vascular occlusion risk are identified before they go into production: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-023-00661-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-023-00661-7
- WithinReason 4y agoStatistically, based on the paper you linked longer testing to pick up this side effect would have been the wrong decision. It seems to me that longer testing would have caused more deaths than would have prevented RVO. From your paper: Based on the official COVID-19 death reports, it is estimated that vaccinations have prevented 14.4 million excess COVID-19 deaths worldwide between December 2020 and December 202139. Thus, vaccination is the most effective method for preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2. The number of reported ophthalmic complications has remained low, and vaccine-related retinal vascular occlusion is very rare, although the number of COVID-19 vaccinations is enormous.
- revelio 4y agoThat paragraph is a logical fallacy. To compute a cost/benefit analysis for something you have to include all the costs, not just one. There are many papers like that one covering many different side effects. Note that there was an attempted discussion of that paper on HN but it was immediately flagged to death. It always happens for every such paper. People still aren't ready to do a full and honest accounting. Probably they never will be.
- Entinel 4y agoI want to comment on this because you are phrasing it as if people who got the vaccine are in denial and not wanting to talk about it. Topics like this are hard to discuss because they are immediately polarizing and everyone who has a strong opinion but very little understanding of the science feels the to get their quip in about how right they are and how wrong the other people are. You can especially since it in threads relating celebrity deaths with comments like "well we know what REALLY killed them wink wink"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]