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Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

nytimes.com

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Re: Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

#11

Post by miraculixx »

Reading 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".

Re: Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

#14

Post by miraculixx »

genghisjahn wrote: post #12
pointlessone wrote: post #2

What can possibly go wrong if we let ChatGPT edit our DNA?

Have you seen DNA? Mistakes and dupes and hallucinations all over the place. Ever since Sherlock Crick and Doctor Watson started meddling with it.

It's one thing to analyze it. It's an entirely different thing to let a machine of dubious abilities create new DNA.

Re: Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

#16

Post by jprete »

sharpshadow wrote: post #13

I 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.

What about computer viruses?

Re: Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

#17

Post by mxwsn »

miraculixx wrote: post #11

Reading 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…

It'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.

Re: Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

#18

Post by swamp40 »

miraculixx wrote: post #11

Reading 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…

Well hopefully it's trained on genetic DNA sequences and not Reddit threads. If so, it should do pretty well predicting the next sequence given previous sequences. There are probably all sorts of undiscovered patterns.

Re: Generative A.I. arrives in the gene editing world of CRISPR

#20

Post by Wissenschafter »

miraculixx wrote: post #14
genghisjahn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen DNA? Mistakes and dupes and hallucinations all over the place. Ever since Sherlock Crick and Doctor Watson started meddling with it.

It's one thing to analyze it. It's an entirely different thing to let a machine of dubious abilities create new DNA.

Isn'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.
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