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Mar 19, 2022

AI drug algorithms can be flipped to generate bioweapons

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, information science, military, robotics/AI

What can heal can also be used to destroy?


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.

He ran the model and left it overnight to create new molecules.

It was quite impressive and scary at the same time, because in our list of the top 100, we were able to find some molecules that are VX analogues

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