Posted on 03/19/2022 3:50:44 PM PDT by Wish2Post
Our model took mere hours to suggest 40,000 potentially lethal compounds, says startup
AI algorithms designed to generate therapeutic drugs can be easily repurposed to invent lethal biochemical weapons, a US startup has warned.
Experts have sounded alarm bells over the potential for machine-learning systems to be used for good and bad. Computer-vision tools can create digital art or deepfakes. Language models can produce poetry or toxic misinformation.
Now, Collaboration Pharmaceuticals, a company based in North Carolina, has shown how AI algorithms used in drug design can be rejigged to create biochemical weapons.
Fabio Urbina, a senior scientist at the startup, said he tinkered with Collaboration Pharmaceuticals' machine-learning software MegaSyn to generate acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, a class of drugs known to treat Alzheimer's disease.
MegaSyn is built to generate drug candidates with the lowest toxicity for patients. That got Urbina thinking. He retrained the model using data to drive the software toward generating lethal compounds, like nerve gas, and flipped the code so that it ranked its output from high-to-low toxicity. In effect, the software was told to come up with the most deadly stuff possible.
That is likely how they used to create covid.
Input the factors they wanted in a virus and up came the variations.
The was human behavior manually manipulating data models not an autonomous robot or AI agent.
Not
Good
N Korea and Iran will be inventing doom chemicals. As will China.
Tick tock.
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