Data Center paranoia has reached fever pitch, but anxieties about AI are not misplaced.
My concern is that people think that by blocking this or that data center, they are stopping AI. Hyperscalers will build data centers in another state, in Tierra del Fuego, in space, underwater or on the moon to feed this market.
What is needed is federal regulation of both data centers, and critically AI and its components.
Wondering how AI could wipe out humanity? Here’s a clue.
Scientists used an artificial intelligence program to create new viral genomes that are different from any known natural viruses and that targeted specific hosts, according to a new study. The development is a hopeful step toward medical advances, but it also raises concerns around the potential for misuse.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, says that genetic sequences from millions of sources “from all domains of life” served as the language library for the AI tool Evo, much like ChatGPT and other language models are trained on large sets of existing text material.
It’s a notable scientific milestone, especially as scientists race to combat rising drug resistance within germs such as E. coli.
“The breakthrough achieved is significant,” Jordi García Ojalvo, professor of systems biology at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona, said in a comment to the Science Media Centre.
But it doesn’t come without hesitation.
“Although this is promising for life sciences applications, it also raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions,” doctors from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security wrote in a corresponding article published in Science.
“The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not,” they wrote.
This capability goes beyond what single-step genome engineering can do and may not be confined to therapeutically beneficial bacteriophages (6). Comparable training data for fine-tuning genomic language models to generate specific genomes exists for many viral families. Although the extent to which these methods can be readily applied to other viruses is unknown, using them to generate genomes of eukaryote-infecting pathogens should not be pursued. Such genomes might encode new pathogens that can infect humans, animals, or plants in ways that cannot be contained by existing countermeasures