[biophysboy]

I probably misunderstood the details of where you think AI will accelerate things. You are worried about AI predicting things like protein structure, binding affinity, and immunogenicity. And using that info to do RL and find a sequence, basically doing evolution in silico. Is this a better representation? That it reduces the search space, requiring less real experiments?

I am basically just skeptical these kinda of reductive predictions will eliminate all of the rate limiting steps of synthetic virology. The assumptions of the natural language input are numerous and would need to be tested in a real lab.

Also, we can already do serial passaging where we just manipulate the organism/environment interaction to make a virus more dangerous. We dont need AI; evolution can do all the hard stuff for you.