AI-Designed Viruses, OpenAI’s First Device, The Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

**John Coogan** (0:33)
It's great to be back, it's Friday. We got a shorter show for everyone today. General Partner of Coastal Ventures coming on to talk about their new investment discovery loop, founded by none other than Jeff Dean and some of his crew from DeepMind. And then we have Patrick Wendell, co-founder of Databricks, joining to talk about their new blog post. I promise it's gonna be more exciting than it sounds like.
No, but they're doing smarter model routing and we're excited to catch up with him.

**Jordi Hays** (1:05)
Very excited. Well, for the first time, scientists have used AI to create entirely new viruses.

**John Coogan** (1:12)
You asked for it. They delivered. They delivered.

**Jordi Hays** (1:18)
They woke up busy.

**John Coogan** (1:18)
You know what we don't have enough of?

**Jordi Hays** (1:20)
Viruses that have never existed in nature before. It's marked a milestone that could accelerate biotechnology while also raising long-term biosecurity questions, of course. Nightmare scenario is you go to Best Buy, you get a gaming PC with a couple pretty stock graphics cards, and you're able to run an open-source model that basically walks you through the steps of creating something really problematic. At the same time, there's a lot of really talented and well-resourced organizations that are fighting that tooth and nail, and so we'll probably see a little, you know, back-and-forth equilibrium there. But lots of interesting questions. It's important to note that these viruses do not affect humans whatsoever. Even these new viruses, they target bacteria. So it's more of an experiment, more of a demo, but you can see where things are going and are working out.

**John Coogan** (2:10)
That doesn't make me that comforted, to be honest.

**Jordi Hays** (2:12)
You like your bacteria to be viruses.

**John Coogan** (2:14)
You know, we naturally have, there's bacteria that is part of being human.

**Jordi Hays** (2:20)
And you would like the bacteria to be unaffected by viruses. Is anyone standing up for the bacteria right now?

**John Coogan** (2:25)
Well, it's more so like you have bacteria in your gut.

**Jordi Hays** (2:28)
Yeah.

**John Coogan** (2:29)
And the gut is kind of an important part of it.

**Jordi Hays** (2:31)
Now that bacteria is going to be suffering from a novel virus, apparently. Yeah. Well, in a study published Thursday in Science, researchers at Stanford and the ARC Institute trained an AI model to recognize patterns in naturally occurring viral DNA, then used it to generate genetic sequences for brand new viruses. After synthesizing those DNA sequences and inserting them into bacteria, the team found the bacteria produced viable viruses capable of infecting other bacteria. The work does not create a new threat to humans. Be careful. I'm sure that will get cut out of a lot of messaging around this because it sounds really scary on its face. The AI was trained only on bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, and specifically excluded viruses that infect humans, plants, animals, and fungi. As a result, the model cannot generate viruses capable of infecting people. While scientists have been synthesizing viral genomes for years to study diseases and develop vaccines, this is the first time AI has been used to design entirely new viruses that function in the real world. I was going back and forth before the show on, is this anything special? We've been using tools to make viruses for bacteria for a long time. This is just another tool to do it, or is this some material breakthrough? That's a debate point. It sounds really scary, but also you've been able to design these viruses in a lab for a long time.
What is the material difference here? I think it all comes back to acceleration and cost. If all of a sudden it becomes a thousand times cheaper to generate viruses, then that could reshape biotech in a positive way, but also have biosecurity implications.

**John Coogan** (4:06)
Yeah. I think a lot of the reaction is just that it feels like a little too soon post-Wuhan, a little too soon post-hugging phase. There's been a variety of events that I think naturally make people a little apprehensive when you see a headline like this.

**Jordi Hays** (4:21)
A lot of people are like, the LEA's or Yudkowsky reaction of, ah, this is bad.
But we'll see where it goes. If the approach proves effective across other classes of viruses, it could become a powerful tool for medicine and biotechnology. Viruses are already widely used as delivery vehicles for gene therapies and other medical treatments. And AI designed viruses could eventually expand that toolkit. At the same time, the research highlights how advances in AI are making it increasingly important that safeguards alongside new capabilities, which I'm sure the ARC Institute is working on. And there's also other AI driven neo-scientific labs. I mean, Jeff Deans, one of those was advancing. One of the goals of his new company is to work on biotech broadly.