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Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

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Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#12
post #6
post #4

I've been under the impression that we don't have new antibiotics because it is not economically viable. When you invent new weight loss drug you can sell millions of pills to anyone. If you invent new antibiotic it is immediately classified as "reserve antibiotic" and the sale is restricted.

>it is immediately classified as "reserve antibiotic" and the sale is restricted. Is that so medical professionals can break it out as a means of last resort to save a patient and ensure the course is finished? If so that mightn't be a bad idea before we destroy the potential of new antibiotics too by having the general public misuse them render them useless over time.

I think the above commenter is just pointing out how the fundamental conflict between these two things results in significantly lessened incentive for pharmaceutical companies to put money into researching new antibiotics

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#13

What is AI? I've only heard of LLM.

"Deep learning" and neural networks in general were a thing long before they were applied specifically to language models.

It's still not "intelligence" but it does use techniques inspired by brains and have some of the same advantages in "seeing" patterns.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#14

What is AI? I've only heard of LLM.

it is just the commercial name for llm and related technologies.

That’s just not true. The technology that’s behind LLMs have been in use in many disciplines for decades. (Under the names “machine learning,” “statistics,” and now AI)

LLMs are just the ones that are popular right now because even non technical people can interact with them.

In the mid 2010s it was image classification, for example.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is just the commercial name for llm and related technologies.

That’s just not true. The technology that’s behind LLMs have been in use in many disciplines for decades. (Under the names “machine learning,” “statistics,” and now AI) LLMs are just the ones that are popular right now because even non technical people can interact with them. In the mid 2010s it was image classification, for example.

Sort of. The deep-learning AI revolution started with back propagation techniques (80s) that made neural nets trainable. But since then it's taken a long time to get to the relatively recent architectural breakthroughs like transformers (2017) and modern-diffusion (2020) which lead to chat-gpt and dall-e. All of the big AI breakthroughs now are based on neural nets vs classical machine learning which grouped a bunch of statistical, regression, and optimization type models together.

Modern AI is the synthesis of new techniques and old ideas plus huge datasets and huge computing power.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#17

Tigecycline https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1426172/ is a new class of antibiotics discovered around 2005 that also works against resistant bacteria such as MRSA and VRE. So while it is great they are coming up with new antibiotics, it is by no means the first in 60 years.

Maybe this is a missing-comma type issue, and they mean that the last time that AI came up with an antibiotic was 60 years ago

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#18
post #17

Tigecycline https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1426172/ is a new class of antibiotics discovered around 2005 that also works against resistant bacteria such as MRSA and VRE. So while it is great they are coming up with new antibiotics, it is by no means the first in 60 years.

Maybe this is a missing-comma type issue, and they mean that the last time that AI came up with an antibiotic was 60 years ago

where would you put the comma to fix that?

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the same issue on Reddit recently. Toxibaccin was discovered in soils in 2018. Hell I know someone who developed one recently at a university. It’s AMAZING AI can do this, but it certainly doesn’t destroy prior approaches. Yet. Disclaimer: spelling and name of antibiotic may be incorrect. It is not my field, and the spelling is phonetic from myself. If pressed, I will ask the scientist for the specific name.

I expect you are referencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin

Discovered in some random dirt from Maine.

Re: Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI

#20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is a missing-comma type issue, and they mean that the last time that AI came up with an antibiotic was 60 years ago

where would you put the comma to fix that?

It’s the first comma in click-bait.
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