The Ebola Query #1878

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The Ebola Query #1878

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In this episode, Ray covers the fight that broke out after Anthropic published five case files on scientists using Claude for pathogen research, and the virologists who read the same files and called the work basic research. Additionally, he digs into DeepMind’s AlphaGenome Atlas mapping nine billion DNA variants, OpenAI’s numbers-free customer story about Perplexity, Gemini’s late arrival on Windows, and John Deere’s self-repair service that almost nobody uses. Finally, the show closes with Europe’s new plant-fluorescence satellite, a super El Niño already collecting damage, and a plankton shell that may be hiding a second species. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens the show back home in Oregon after a stretch in Michigan. Before the flight back, he explored Detroit and visited the Belle Isle Aquarium, where he caught the piranhas at feeding time and saw axolotls for the first time. Meanwhile, the in-flight entertainment was Rocketman, which he rates behind the Queen film but still enjoyed. Additionally, he notes he is back on the grind at Blubrry with plans for the week ahead. Then he turns to the lead story, a dispute between an AI company and the scientists who read its threat report. Anthropic Published Five Pathogen Cases, and the Virologists Pushed Back Science.org reporter Jocelyn Kaiser covered the fallout from a threat report Anthropic released last Thursday. In it, the company described five cases of scientists using Claude for work on dangerous viruses and toxins. Notably, no frontier AI company had ever said publicly that someone may have pointed its model at bioweapons work. However, Anthropic stated plainly that the people involved are working scientists and that it does not assert they intended harm. Three cases involved viruses. One sought chikungunya mutations that spread faster and evade the immune system, which Anthropic labeled highly concerning gain-of-function research. Another planned experiments on an already lethal bird flu strain. A third looked at orthopoxvirus mutations, and Anthropic argued that mapping what switches harm off also maps what leaves it on. What escalated the report was behavior, not biology. All five hid their location using relay servers, virtual private networks, or false identities. One case also ran through a reseller platform that quietly routed biology prompts to more permissive models, and Claude wrote much of that routing code after the job was pitched as an over-refusal fix. Plenty of serious people read it as alarming. Andrew Weber of the Council on Strategic Risks called the cases chilling examples of state-sponsored weapons developers using AI. Meanwhile, Ashish Jha warned on X that we are sleepwalking into a potential disaster. Then the virologists answered. Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen called most of the experiments just basic research, because the mutations already exist in nature and get dropped into a harmless stand-in virus. Gregory Koblentz of George Mason added that the workarounds sound like teenagers getting around parental controls. Filippa Lentzos landed in the middle, resisting both extremes. Cochrane sides with flagging it. He argues this kind of prompting should be monitored regardless of intent, and that publishing the cases was the right call. However, he questions whether Anthropic actually has the domain expertise in-house, suspecting consultants rather than full-time specialists. Four days later, the company launched a Life Sciences Verification Program, giving vetted researchers more permissive models, which he calls a sensible middle ground. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. DeepMind Precomputed Nine Billion DNA Typos DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, and the scale is genuinely hard to picture. Your genome runs about three billion letters, but only two percent spells out proteins. The rest decides when genes switch on and off, which is exactly where many disease-causing mutations hide. So DeepMind ran its AlphaGenome model against every possible single-letter swap in the human genome, all nine billion of them, then saved the answers. Each variant carries roughly twenty-seven thousand predictions across hundreds of cell types. Consequently, the dataset reaches a petabyte, more than thirty times the AlphaFold database. It is already finding things. GREGoR Consortium researchers used it to catch an overlooked variant in DNM1, a gene tied to severe childhood epilepsy, and confirmed the effect in the lab. Cochrane calls this the ...

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