आईसीटी समाचार
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to find breakthrough pharmaceuticals to help enhance human life, but a recent research has discovered that AI might also be used to create lethal biochemical weapons. Collaborations Pharmaceuticals held a symposium at the Swiss Spiez Laboratory to look at how drug discovery technology may be abused. And their model created more than 40,000 potentially lethal compounds in just six hours of operation, including ones that were closely linked to the nerve toxin VX.
The researchers wrote in a paper for the journal Nature Machine Intelligence titled "Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery" that they had never contemplated using AI for bad reasons before. They added, "We were dimly aware of security risks surrounding work with diseases or dangerous chemicals, but that did not pertain to us." "The foundation of our work is the development of machine learning models for therapeutic and hazardous targets to aid in the development of novel compounds for drug discovery."
We've spent decades utilizing computers and artificial intelligence to promote, not worsen, human health. We were naïve in our assessment of the potential for our commerce to be abused." 'MegaSyn,' the company's chemical search algorithm, often employs machine learning to forecast the bioactivity of novel medications it discovers. Their standard approach penalizes projected toxicity while rewarding compounds that match the bioactivity they seek. This time, they reversed the rationale and instead rewarded toxicity.
They used data from a public database to train the AI with chemicals that are both synthesizable and likely to be absorbed, as well as a deadly dose level to restrict the field significantly. They opted to focus the model on substances like VX, which is one of the most lethal chemical agents available. According to the experts, just a few salt-sized grains may kill a person. The discovery of 40,000 in only a few hours served as a wake-up call to the researchers. "Not only VX, but many additional known chemical warfare compounds" were created by the AI, according to the creators.
"Many additional compounds were developed as well, all of which appeared to be as plausible. These new compounds were expected to be more hazardous than chemical warfare weapons that were already on the market. This was surprising because these nerve agents were not included in the datasets we used to train the AI. "A nonhuman autonomous maker of a lethal chemical weapon is thus perfectly plausible, as demonstrated by our proof of concept." The findings should serve as a wake-up call for colleagues, according to the researchers. "This isn't science fiction, believe it or not. They added, "We are simply one little firm in a world of hundreds of enterprises utilizing AI software for drug development."
