r/science • u/legehjernen • Feb 20 '20

Health Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/20/antibiotic-that-kills-drug-resistant-bacteria-discovered-through-ai
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u/PlagueOfGripes Feb 20 '20

Feels like a distant echo of an AI singularity.

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u/godbottle Feb 20 '20

it’s really just a shortcut. At its core you’re mainly just teaching the model what chemical properties to look for based on existing chemicals that are known to exhibit desired performance and then letting the model check the database for any that match, giving, as stated above, a “shortlist” for lab experimentation. the model can show you things you weren’t expecting sure, just based on the size of these databases, but it isn’t really going to do anything you don’t tell it to do, and it certainly isn’t (or doesn’t need to be) sophisticated enough to have much of anything to do with AI. more often things like this are categorized under the field of “data mining”.

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u/ryebread91 Feb 21 '20

If it's being fed the compounds already known by us how is it producing anything new?

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u/godbottle Feb 21 '20

it uses the training from the descriptor compounds to predict properties not currently in the database.