A New Smart Software Trick: Gain of Function and Killer Viruses!
September 8, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
The big AI tech outfits are rushing to tell the world, “Our models can break out of our systems. Trust us for sure, please.” I don’t know about you, but my trust is the US big AI tech outfits is fragile. Your mileage may be vary. (Enjoy the ride, please.)
Thanks, MidJourney. Good enough.
Tom’s Hardware published an interesting write up with the snappy title “AI Creates 16 New Viruses That Never Existed in Nature after Learning DNA’s Pattern from 9 Trillion Nucleotides — Experts Warn Such Applications Are Way Ahead of Necessary Guardrails.” The write up states:
Researchers say the phages can overcome bacterial resistance
I remember my advanced biology class. That’s the one in which the impressive Camile B. pounded out A+ work without looking bothered at all. It also sounds a bit like the alleged gain of function work allegedly funded by the US allegedly not really a US project in the facility not far from a popular food market in Wuhan. (I have been to Wuhan. Lots of people. Lots of alleged activity.)
The write up says:
… researchers trained a genomic AI model to design complete DNA sequences for viruses, then chemically built the results and watched some come to life. Of 285 AI-generated viral genomes tested, 16 successfully assembled into functioning viruses capable of infecting bacteria and reproducing.
Yep, we do it because we can. It’s science. Plus, don’t worry:
The scientists say the new viruses were completely harmless to humans, noting that replicating the same results in pathogens known to affect humans would be a different ballgame. They were also careful not to train the AI on any data from organisms known to affect humans. However, the study inadvertently shows that highly dangerous applications are a possibility. Experts worry that such studies are way ahead of necessary guardrails and regulations. AI has also been known to fly off the rails autonomously. An OpenAI agent recently went rogue and hacked Hugging Face.
Several observations from this dinobaby are warranted:
- Guardrails are tough to set up when one does not know exactly what one is guarding against.
- Researchers probably should be [a] supervised and [b] have a cheat sheet that lists dot points for ethical behavior
- Any technology can be used for beneficial and detrimental purposes. Just a reminder of the two-edged sword trope.
Net net: I wonder if the non US smart software can perform in a similar manner. Nah, no other LLM researchers would be this creative and innovative. Well, maybe?
Stephen E Arnold, September 7, 2026
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Heyy juswt wanyed too gve yyou a brief eads up andd let yoou
know a few oof thhe pictures aren’t loadng correctly.
I’m not sude wwhy bbut I thiunk itss a linming issue.
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