Alfonso Valencia

Alfonso Valencia

Alfonso Valencia
Cargo

ICREA professor and director of Life Sciences at the Barcelona National Supercomputing Centre (BSC).

More than thirty scientists warn in Science about the dangers of synthesizing 'mirror bacteria'

Thirty eight scientists from different specialties, including Craig Venter, a pioneer in the creation of artificial synthetic life, have written an article in the journal Science in which they assess the possibilities of synthesizing mirror organisms, but also warn of the risks they pose. This type of microorganisms, which would present a mirror structure to that currently found in nature, would have potential applications due to their resistance to biological degradation. However, they would also pose a danger because they would not be recognized by our defenses and could spread in ecosystems. Scientists call for more research and a broad debate, and warn that until more is known, this type of organism should not be created. 

 

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Open or Closed Artificial Intelligence: How Science Suffers When Technology is in the Hands of Big Companies

Two of the Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry 2024 are employees of Google DeepMind, who caused significant unrest among their colleagues in May. Hassabis and Jumper announced in *Nature* the results of their AlphaFold 3 model, with applications in drug design; however, they published it in a closed manner, with reviewers not even having access to the system, which contradicts the basic principles of scientific publication. We risk having the transformative potential of AI controlled by big tech companies.

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Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Baker, Hassabis and Jumper for computational protein design and structure prediction

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 on the one hand to David Baker for computational protein design, which makes it possible to construct proteins with functions not present in nature. On the other hand, jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of Google DeepMind, for the development of AlphaFold2, which allows the structure of the 200 million known proteins to be predicted at high speed. 

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Reactions: EU institutions agree on artificial intelligence law

After lengthy negotiations, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU - which represents the member states - reached a provisional agreement last night on the content of the 'AI Act', the future law that will regulate the development of artificial intelligence in Europe, the first in the world. The agreement limits the use of biometric identification systems by security forces, includes rules for generative AI models such as ChatGPT and provides for fines of up to 35 million euros for those who violate the rules, among other measures. The text must now be formally adopted by the Parliament and Council before it becomes EU law.

 

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Reaction: Meta publishes ESMFold, a model that predicts the structure of hundreds of millions of proteins

Meta has applied language modelling to predict the structure of a large collection of proteins. The model, called ESMFold, is being presented this week in the journal Science after being published on the bioRxiv preprint article server in December 2022. EMSFold is faster than similar models such as AlphaFold, developed by Google's DeepMind and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute. The sequences of more than 617 million proteins - of which more than a third are predicted with a high degree of confidence - are published in open access in the ESM Metagenomic Atlas.

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Reactions: ChatGPT algorithms could help identify Alzheimer's cases

Artificial intelligence algorithms using ChatGPT - the OpenAI company's GPT-3 language model - can identify speech features to predict the early stages of Alzheimer's disease with 80 per cent accuracy. The neurodegenerative disease causes a loss of the ability to express oneself that the algorithms could recognise, according to the journal PLOS Digital Health.

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