Iceland – Theatre Preview

‘Artificial intelligence’ based on large language models is shaping up to be the most efficient destroyer of value since the South Sea Bubble. After “the Crash”, which is inevitably coming, some specific functions of AI will eventually turn out to be genuinely revenue-generating, and a lot of jobs will duly disappear. But the biggest winner (and potentially biggest loser) is medical science.

Dr. Brian Hie, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California, has just revealed that his team has made the first viruses designed by artificial intelligence. They are ‘bacteriophages’, viruses that only infect bacteria and are widely used to treat people with infections that resist other treatments.

However, natural bacteriophages sometimes fail, so Dr. Hie used generative AI to design new ones that might do the job. The AI generated thousands of designs for new genomes that more or less fit the bill, and he chose around 300 of them to build in the lab. It’s hard work, not magic, but he ended up with 16 ‘novel’ bacteriophages that might work.

He applied them to petri dishes containing two harmful strains of E. coli, a common bacteria that lives in the human gut, and they killed the bacteria off. It’s still early days, but if it is truly becoming possible to tailor-make bacteriophages that target specific bacteria, then we may be getting a major new weapon in the struggle against antibiotic resistance.