AI can design biochemical weapons (+ 3D renderings, NFT game hack, EU ruins messaging)

Let's get smarter about tech with this week's most important tech news!?You can also hear everything about them in 17 minutes on?my podcast.

AI can design biochemical weapons

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• What happened:?Collaborations Pharmaceuticals is a company specialized in drug discovery: using AI to identify new drugs that can cure diseases and improve human lives. Their technology is designed to identify drugs that have high target activity (i.e. they’re effective in doing whatever they’re designed to do), and low toxicity (i.e. they don’t kill you). As an experiment, they tried flipping their algorithm and asked it to find molecules with high toxicity instead. Six hours later, their algorithm had generated thousands of formulas for toxic compounds.
• What I’m thinking:?scientific research is familiar with the concept of “dual-use” - technology that can be used for both peaceful and military aims. There are clear regulations and checkpoints to limit the negative applications of these technologies. AI research is still a pretty naive field, with companies and scientific institutions churning out open-source papers like they’re candy, and then being surprised when someone uses them to generate pornographic deepfakes. Or biochemical weapons. I’ll say it again: ethics and governance are?the?challenges of AI today.
• Research links:?Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery,?AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours

NVIDIA publishes an AI algorithm to turn 2D images into 3D

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• What happened:?Nvidia published an AI algorithm that takes pictures in 2d and turns them into a high-res 3d rendering in milliseconds. This technology existed for two years, but NVIDIA made it 1000x faster and it’s ready to be used. Applications can be in robotics (e.g. to improve the sensing capabilities of self-driving cars) or, obviously, the metaverse.
• What I’m thinking:?AI development is still progressing exponentially, with applications that turn from impossible to ordinary in months. There are HUGE opportunities for fast, agile companies to take these advancements and turn them into products. Do you have any ideas on cool stuff to build with this tech? Shoot me a message!
• Research links:?Nvidia shows off AI model that turns a few dozen snapshots into a 3D-rendered scene - The Verge,?NeRF Research Turns 2D Photos Into 3D Scenes | NVIDIA Blog

The biggest NFT game gets hacked

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• What happened:?Axie Infinity is the biggest NFT game in the world. It’s basically like pokemon, but you’re fighting with tradeable NFT monsters and earn crypto while playing. It’s built on an Ethereum side-chain, which means that it uses the company’s own nodes to verify transactions. The nodes were only 9, so a hacker managed to get control of 5 and steal all the money ($600M...)
• What I’m thinking:?The history of crypto seems to be a constant cycle of “this tech is amazing, it’ll change the world for the better” and “Ups, we messed up and someone stole everything”, just to forget the bad stuff and go back to “this tech is amazing”. Interesting how in this case the hack wasn’t made by exploiting a technical bug, but through social engineering (they basically stole someone’s password).
• Research links:?Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network suffers largest-ever crypto hack,?Ronin $600M hack tweet,?Community Alert: Ronin Validators Compromised

The EU wants to ruin messaging

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• What happened:?The EU approved the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The most controversial thing is that it requires the owners of messaging apps will be required to make them interoperable if another company requests that they do so. Basically, Whatsapp, iMessage, Snapchat, Messenger, etc. all need to work together. They think that today’s messaging apps create monopolies and hinder competition.
• What I’m thinking:?This is yet another law written by 99.9% of lawmakers and 0.1% of tech people. The law explains at a high level what they want, but has no clue about?how?this can be done. What does it mean to send a snap through iMessage? There’s a risk of ruining the user experience across ALL messaging apps. And that’s not even the worst thing: most of these apps use end-to-end encryption, which makes them safe and private. To make them interoperable, we may have to ditch them. Someone on Twitter said, “this is a mind-numbingly foolish, privacy-destroying, encryption-busting, innovation-killing proposal, dressed up in clothes of anti-monopoly.”. I kinda agree.
• Research links:?(3) Alec Muffett on Twitter,?Forcing WhatsApp and iMessage to Work Together Is Doomed to Fail | WIRED UK

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