SO WHAT IF I AM?! ARE YOU SAYING BACTERIA-AMERICANS ARE TOO STUPID TO USE THE INTERNET?!

You’re mixing up colloquial usage with scientific usage. Scientists are notoriously bad at giving things names (thanks dark matter…) All LLMs are neural networks. All neural networks are AI. Not all AI are neural networks. Not all neural networks are LLMs. This is a case of nested hierarchies, like phylogenetic taxonomies. You are a bony fish.

So yes, LLMs are literally just a form of neural networks, but the language they learn on does not have to specifically be English, or German. And this “Language” was genetic code. So Evo1 and Evo2 Literally speak genetic code. That is their language, since it is what they were trained on. They are predictive text models that can predict what the next genetic sequence will/should be.

I’ve never spoken to Grok in my life, but you seem disinterested in having an honest conversation about this while accusing me of being a shill or stupid. Precisely the tendency I named in my first message. I reject the premise that AI is pure shit, which you snuck in when comparing what I called the anti-AI movement to an anti-eating-shit movement. But you have not even tried to tell me why AI is shit, in the context of being used to improve weather prediction, and develop new drugs. I’m happy to hear why I’m wrong, but are you willing to actually talk about it, or do you just want to insult me?

You don’t understand. This isn’t a debate. They used Evo1 and Evo2 which are both LLMs. That is just a fact. You don’t understand what LLMs are. I’m not trying to be mean or rude, it’s simply true if you think an LLM couldn’t do this, because it literally did.

Edit: sorry, that probably came of extremely rude and short tempered, and I shouldn’t treat you that way.

LLMs are not only chat-bots, and in fact so not even need to “speak” any language you or I would recognize. Evo 1 & 2 are LLMs built off of raw genomic data. Literally the raw A, C, G, T pattern of the genetic code itself. Trillions of nucleotides. So the output of the LLM wasn’t “Here’s what a bacteriophage would look like!” It was “AT,CG,AG…” Raw genetic code which can then be synthesized.

And I reject that premise entirely, which is why I asked directly whether or not you supported the usage of AI I listed. Because from what I have seen, people who reject AI do so wholesale, with no regard to how it is being used. That’s what I mean by the Anti-AI movement, not that you have a club and meetings.

I am not defending your bosses use of AI to vibecode, but that has absolutely nothing to do with what OP posted.

So are you condemning an entire technology and field of research on the grounds of the worst examples, or do you support the usage of AI in the fields I mentioned?

Okay, then you don’t actually understand my position at all. Would you rather tell me what I believe, and reinforce my assertion that you’re misinformed. Or would you like to actually understand my position, and destroy the strawman that you have built?

This is a proposed replacement for antibiotics, it cannot hurt. Your body contains more bacteriophages than human cells and bacteria combined.

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.

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.

No, it isn’t. This isn’t a virus that can hurt you, it’s a virus that PHYSICALLY cannot infect anything other than bacteria. It is a proposed replacement for antibiotics, which will lose their effectiveness in the near future.

Unless you want the majority of humans to be killed by bacterial infections again, like we did pre-penicillin.

Or have a suggestion for a way to kill bacteria that doesn’t use modern antibiotics.

It was actually a LLM trained on very specific data. In this case, bacteriophage research. LLMs are not just chatbots.

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.

Ebola isn’t a bacteriophage. Do you understand what this research actually does? I’m not trying to be rude, but fear about this can only be spawned from not understanding what a bacteriophage is, what it does, and how it does it.

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.

That’s objectively false. LLMs are neural networks, which is a form of AI.

It was an LLM trained on mountains of research.

So you advocate for using AI to develop new drugs? Study weather patterns? Assist in physics and material sciences? Assist with coding? Are you saying pro-AI people think all AI should be embraced at every level, and replace humans?

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.

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.

And thank you for taking the time to fill in your knowledge gaps! I really appreciate the willingness and patience.