[dopylitty]

Given that we still don’t know the mechanism by which variants achieve their increased fitness I’m a little suspicious of claims of using “AI” to identify new variants.

Claims that spike affinity for ACE2 (or indeed changes to the spike protein at all) haven’t been conclusively proven to increase fitness as far as I know. It’s possible that this tool is simply overfit to the known variants and wouldn’t detect a new one.

I’d be interested to hear what real virologists think of this.

[maxerickson]

Is the concern that this tool would be prioritized over other information?

Like what is the harm in doing the data collection and publishing about how it is going?