Reacción a "AI designs functional bacteriophages from scratch"

The press release accurately reflects the content of the article, although it focuses heavily (from the very first sentence) on microbial resistance – which is only part of the findings – and on biosafety issues, which, again, are only part of the discussion. The breakthrough achieved is significant, as it demonstrates that a complete functional genome can be designed from scratch using generative AI, but there are a few points to consider.

Firstly, the efficiency of the process is low: out of thousands of genomes generated, only 16 viable phages are obtained (it could be argued that the rest are ‘hallucinations’ of the model – at least the remaining 300 genomes tested in the laboratory, out of the thousands designed). It is to be hoped that future versions of this procedure will improve efficiency, but it is unclear whether a qualitative leap will be achieved, as the data available to these genomic language models is (and will remain) limited. This low efficiency is reminiscent of Yamanaka’s stem cell reprogramming, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012; whilst efficiency has been gradually improving, 14 years on it remains low (in this case, with generative AI, it is more difficult to implement).

Secondly, from a biosafety perspective, in my opinion the risk here is lower than with traditional LLMs, as the designed genomes must be tested in the laboratory one by one, as was done in the article, and, as I have said, the efficiency is low. It is difficult to imagine these models automatically generating viable genomes ‘out-of-the-box’.
Finally, I would also like to emphasise that these advances do not help us understand why some genomes are viable and others are not. Understanding is a human capacity, and in this respect, generative AI cannot replace us.