Since its inception, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been considered a tool to help us make life easier. We’ve seen AI develop from basic computing abilities to complex algorithms that can solve difficult problems quickly and accurately. While advances in AI are now common practice, many still don’t understand the true potential of AI: it’s mimicking natural human evolution.
That’s right—with each advancement in machine learning, artificial intelligence is becoming more agile and intelligent than humans could have imagined. We’ll explore human evolutionary processes and discuss why an artificially intelligent future might be brighter than anything we’ve ever expected.
-An AI language model has generated proteins comparable to those developed through millions of years of evolution.
– ProGen, created by Salesforce, built sequences based on the “phrases” of organic proteins.
– Researchers are looking into the possibility of AI determining appropriate treatments for ailments such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
AI has demonstrated that it can excel in biology, just as in many other pursuits. It can copy human language and surpass its creators in games such as chess. Every time scientists develop AI, it always matches or exceeds our capabilities.
An AI created by the University of California-San Francisco, the University of California-Berkeley, and Salesforce Research (the science arm of a San Francisco-based software company) has been developed to mimic evolution. While this doesn’t mean it is creating an evolutionary superhuman (not yet), it has designed sequences composed of 20 amino acids that are part of proteins.
In contrast to the creations of nature, some of the sequences designed by the researchers proved equal to those refined through millions of years of evolution. These results were reported in Nature Biotechnology journal. Biotechnology journal.
Rather than developing an AI from the ground up, researchers harnessed Salesforce’s ProGen natural language-processing technology and applied it to create “sentences” for biological proteins. This language is made of amino acids and has proven a successful starting point for Artificial Intelligence development. Intelligence development. Intelligence development.
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Nikhil Naik, the Director of AI Research at Salesforce Research, informed Motherboard.
Nikhil Naik says:
“In the same way that words are strung together one-by-one to form text sentences, amino acids are strung together one-by-one to make proteins.”
“Building on this insight, we apply neural language modeling to proteins for generating realistic, yet novel protein sequences.”
After training ProGen with 280 million proteins, the AI was optimized using a method that predicts the probability of an upcoming amino acid based on previous amino acids in the raw sequence. The team then tested five artificial proteins to a natural enzyme from chicken eggs, called hen egg white lysozyme; two AI-generated proteins showed promising results.
AI has achieved a remarkable accomplishment by designing human proteins, which has not been done before. ProGen’s artificial intelligence (AI) could find evolutionary patterns even though it wasn’t designed for this purpose. Salesforce estimates that 73 percent of the proteins designed by AI are functional, which is higher than natural proteins’ 59% success rate.
The Salesforce AI Research team isn’t simply concerned with whether Artificial Intelligence language models can create proteins. Their research has a more important purpose: to use ProGen to uncover treatments for diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis caused by proteins at their core.
Some AIs are designed to compete against humans in games. At the same time, language models like ProGen could eventually assist humanity in addressing major health issues since the beginning.
Darren, a resident of Portland, is an expert in the sci-fi genre and our world. He has a cat, and his work can be found on Gizmodo and Paste if you look carefully.
AI has the potential to outpace human evolution. With the rapid pace of development in AI technology, it’s’ hard to say what obstacles will remain in their way. But one thing is sure: as AI gets smarter, humanity must find ways to keep up.
Source: Popular Mechanics
