7 ms·
Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR
- salynchnew 2y agoThe real endgame here isn't to just enumerate and then patent those sequences, right?
- VikingCoder 2y agoCaptain Trips One of the four horsemen of the AI apocalypse.
- pointlessone 2y agoWhat can possibly go wrong if we let ChatGPT edit our DNA?
- spywaregorilla 2y ago[flagged]
- throwup238 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- genghisjahn 2y agoHave you seen DNA? Mistakes and dupes and hallucinations all over the place. Ever since Sherlock Crick and Doctor Watson started meddling with it.
- miraculixx 2y agoIt's one thing to analyze it. It's an entirely different thing to let a machine of dubious abilities create new DNA.
- Wissenschafter 2y agoIsn't DNA in itself a machine of dubious abilities? It's only functional because what functions is what survives, imagine the amount of 'unsurvived' because of how shit the code is.
- yieldcrv 2y agomachines that undergo accelerate evolution, I would trust them more under rigorous guidelines I just need to be able to test the guidelines and results. Clinical trial process to make an objective decision from that point.
- arcticfox 2y agoThis model has nothing to do with ChatGPT other than transformers. And as someone that could desperately use some advances in gene editing, this lowbrow dismissal is frustrating.
- piloto_ciego 2y agoMore and more I find the flippant dismissal of the amazing breakthroughs that are constantly streaming in kind of disheartening. Nobody is impressed by anything anymore, nobody is excited about the future - everything’s just “terrible” and everything looking forward is bad. I hate that mindset and I’m sick and tired of cynicism poisoning practically every online space. Thank you for saying it’s “lowbrow” and giving OP a little bit of a hard time.
- agos 2y agothe breakthroughs in tech are great, the way they are marketed, sold, and pushed in our lives by means of adtech everywhere... not so much.
- piloto_ciego 2y agoPart of me says - and this is somewhat of a hot take - "then stop using platforms that mash ads into everything?" I don't know, like, I'm here for the rebel yell against global industrial capitalism - let's replace it with the solar punk world of our dreams, but... like, we're not going to do that any time soon, so instead of complaining about "how terrible everything is" let's try to do better. Let's be excited about this stuff. Let's be positive.
- m3kw9 2y agoAnd how does ChatGPT edit your dna
- Mindless2112 2y agoHave you seen how generative AI thinks hands work? Just a few edits and reality can catch up.
- torotonnato 2y ago[flagged]
- visarga 2y ago[flagged]
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- mxwsn 2y agoGift article (no paywall): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/technology/generative-ai-gene-editing-crispr.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mk0.T7-S.0EFqiNdALV08&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/22/technology/generative-ai-... Preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.22.590591v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.22.590591v1
- byearthithatius 2y agoHey thanks:) That was nice of you
- neuronexmachina 2y agoAnd their repo: https://github.com/Profluent-AI/OpenCRISPR https://github.com/Profluent-AI/OpenCRISPR
- JoeH2 2y agoVery kind of you! Thank you!
- miraculixx 2y agoReading their blog post I wonder if an LLMs is really the best way to do this. If I got it right, they used the LLM to enumerate potential protein DNA sequences. Does that really need an LLM? Enumeration is not novel, nor are LLMs particularily good at it. If you want to computationally parallelize the search in a large enumeration space it would be much easier to simply, well, do that instead of taking a detour via a statistical parrot. In a nutshell this sounds more like a case of "we wanted something with AI in the title".
- mxwsn 2y agoIt's not an English LLM, but a "protein" language model, where tokens represent amino acids or nucleotides. Learning a transformer language model on such data simply learns a distribution over sequences of tokens. It's a fine approach conceptually that in many ways is the "right" way or most elegant method, and not a stretch at all.
- throwawaymaths 2y agoyeah but your training is bottlenecked by the lack of ground truth. Some things were(I presume)/will be easy to do with LLMs, like protein structure, because every part of every protein is source data (and there's millions of known structure). But suppose you want to estimate clearance, or ld50. How many proteins do we know their serum clearance? 1000? 10000 maybe?
- devindotcom 2y agoI enjoyed the feeling when I made this connection talking with a startup doing this a while back. It's just a different "language" and although it's not a given that LLMs can operate in it, it's a reasonable thing to try, and it turns out they can.
- dekhn 2y agoPersonally I think it was obvious that LLMs were going to be useful for protein modelling since the previous generation used HMMs very successfully. Pfam (a library of HMMs for classifying proteins into preexisting known families) is one of the most important resources we have because of the power of HMMs to model sequential language. I suspect we will need to move from sequential modelling to graphical modelling to level-up again, though.
- sharpshadow 2y agoI still consider biological life as the best ‘robot’ because it can create more of itself. As long as robots are incapable of recreation I don’t see the threat. One could say all maschines today are infertile.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jprete 2y agoWhat about computer viruses?
- r2_pilot 2y agoComputer viruses run on hardware they do not create but merely hijack. Unless a virus took control of a semiconductor fab, it's hard to argue that they are alive/reproducing in the context of this discussion.
- scarmig 2y agoParasites do the same thing: hijack a piece of hardware and use it to reproduce. Computer viruses have even formed a kind of symbiotic ecosystem with blackhats: the scammer provides resources to help the virus reproduce, and the virus provides access to the scammer in turn. In a way, all life hijacks hardware (the material world) that it doesn't create to reproduce itself.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoComputer viruses need to get an ability to mutate by themselves, improving the code overtime though.
- ben_w 2y agoSimulated evolution is trivial to implement, but my guess is also a bit pointless from the point of view of most people writing viruses — the viruses might mutate to not give them money.
- RIMR 2y ago[flagged]
- cooper_ganglia 2y agoDie Instantly Man is the worst superhero...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- swamp40 2y agoImagine an AI learning from photos/videos of a person and their DNA sequence? And also a list of diseases, health records, etc. Then asking it for predictions while giving it feedback afterwards so it can tune itself. You could even guarantee privacy. That would be some really useful data.
- paxys 2y agoYou mean exactly what 23andMe tried to do, and failed miserably at.
- swamp40 2y agoWe are still early. Eventually you'll be able to change your race, gender, add reptile eyes, regrow limbs etc. Has to start somewhere. Need more data.
- pharmaz0ne 2y agoExactly. We should start building global database connecting DNA with medical history.
- swamp40 2y agoNot a big fan? It could be provably private. You could have a kit with a random username/password. It could be done. People just have a bad taste from 23andMe.
- dekhn 2y agoYou mean, like UKBB and All of Us already do, but less nationally focused? The approach seems fraught with complexity due to the complexity of medical ethics, the variation of national laws, and strongly-held nationalist positions.
- ronald_raygun 2y agoI can already change my race. I just check a different box on government forms...
- m3kw9 2y ago[flagged]
- cjk2 2y agoIt cured my investment interest in it.
- JangoSteve 2y agoDo you mean for AI to do the entire job of researching, creating, testing, manufacturing, and distributing a cure, or just for AI to be involved? And do you mean completely eradicating a disease, or just producing a cure for it? And do you mean an outright cure, or also a treatment or vaccine? If the latter in all cases, here's an example: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/26/1058743/i-was-there-when-ai-helped-create-a-vaccine-covid-moderna-mrna/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/26/1058743/i-was-th... If you mean the former in any case, it'll probably be a while, if ever in our lifetimes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- a-r-t 2y agoSo the six finger hands were just a foreshadowing?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Karellen 2y agoIs this going to be as good as when AI arrived in the world of materials science? https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/ https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-o... Or is it only just going to be as good at generating headlines?