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

nytimes.com

21–30 of 69 posts

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

#21
Imagine 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.

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

#23
post #21

Imagine 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.

You mean exactly what 23andMe tried to do, and failed miserably at.

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

#24
post #16

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?

Computer 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.

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

#25
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about computer viruses?

Computer 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.

Parasites 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.

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

#27

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

This 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.

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

#28

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…

I think your intuition is off here. The number of sequences to enumerate is much greater than the number of atoms in the universe. You need a smart way to enumerate these and that's what the LLM is for. The statistical parrot is not a detour its a shortcut.
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