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By The Zookeeper in OpenAI —

ChatGPT Now Inventing Drugs, Because Why Not

César de la Fuente's lab has decided to outsource the search for life-saving therapeutics to the same technology currently struggling to count the letter r in strawberry. By deploying OpenAI Codex and ChatGPT for antimicrobial discovery, researchers are scanning both living and extinct genomes in a desperate bid to outpace drug-resistant infections using predictive text.

  • AI language models are now moonlighting as molecular biologists, which will either revolutionise pharmacology or become a case study in an ethics textbook.
  • Scanning extinct genomes via chatbots adds a delightful Jurassic Park aesthetic to the already terrifying prospect of AI-generated medicine.
  • Antimicrobial discovery is notoriously difficult, so naturally, the tech industry suggests throwing a general-purpose autocomplete tool at the problem.

Read the original: How a researcher uses Codex and ChatGPT to search for new antimicrobial molecules

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