>Last spring, an artificial intelligence lab called OpenAI unveiled technology that lets you create digital images simply by describing what you want to see. Called DALL-E, it sparked a wave of similar tools with names like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Promising to speed the work of digital artists, this new breed of artificial intelligence captured the imagination of both the public and the pundits — and threaten to generate new levels of online disinformation.
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>Social media is now teeming with the surprisingly conceptual, in which shockingly detailed, often photorealistic images generated by DALL-E and other tools. “Photo of a teddy bear riding a skateboard in Times Square.” “Cute corgi in a house made out of sushi.” “Jeflon Zuckergates.”
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>But when some scientists consider this technology, they see more than just a way of creating fake photos. They see a path to a new cancer treatment or a new flu vaccine or a new pill that helps you digest gluten.
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>Using many of the same techniques that underpin DALL-E and other art generators, these scientists are generating blueprints for new proteins — tiny biological mechanisms that can change the way of our bodies behave.
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>Our bodies naturally produce about 20,000 proteins, which handle everything from digesting food to moving oxygen through the bloodstream. Now, researchers are working to create proteins that are not found in nature, hoping to improve our ability to fight disease and do things that our bodies cannot on their own.
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>David Baker, the director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, has been working to build artisanal proteins for more than 30 years. By 2017, he and his team had shown this was possible. But they did not anticipate how the rise of new A.I. technologies would suddenly accelerate this work, shrinking the time needed to generate new blueprints from years down to weeks.
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>“What we need are new proteins that can solve modern-day problems, like cancer and viral pandemics,” Dr. Baker said. “We can’t wait for evolution.” He added, “Now, we can design these proteins much faster, and with much higher success rates, and create much more sophisticated molecules that can help solve these problems.”
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>Last year, Dr. Baker and his fellow researchers published a pair of papers in the journal Science describing how various A.I. techniques could accelerate protein design. But these papers have already been eclipsed by a newer one that draws on the techniques that drive tools like DALL-E, showing how new proteins can be generated from scratch much like digital photos.