this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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  1. For context, this is a bacteriophage, which is a virus which infects bacteria. It is being used in a compassionate use scenario as a last-ditch effort against an antibiotic resistant bacterial infection.
  2. Bacteriophages tend to be sufficiently specialized to infect viruses that there's not really a risk of them infecting humans. (There is some possibility of bacteriophages infecting beneficial bacteria such as the human gut biome, but I don't know how much of a risk that would be in this case)
  3. While I'm not clear on the details of the AI being used here, it is described as a "multimodal genome language model" by the company and appears to be trained very specifically on the genetic data of bacteriophages which infect the target bacteria.

When it comes to medicine, it's best to move slowly and keep things intact, and while AI trained like this does have promise for exactly these sorts of medical purposes, it's still algorithms outputting stuff which cannot be blindly trusted. But this also isn't ChatGPT spitting out some idea of bacterial genetic code it generated from predictive text based on the collected works of Michael Crichton. Let's not spread misinformed panic.