AI

The first thing to note is that AI isn't new. Around 2000 the US military was using AI to try and develop self-repairing minefields. God knows what projects they are testing in their skunk works facilities two decades later.

The recent public leap forward in AI was purely commercial, Microsoft poured billions into ChatGPT to try and get a competitive jump over Google with Bing and other products. Some say the launch was too early, it definitely was in terms of the legislation keeping up, but not so much re: Google as their launch of Bard (Googles ChatGPT competitor) was definitely underdone and rushed to market to try and keep up.

As a side note the scraping of all this data blows up data traffic around the world unless blocked server side. The Chinese based TikTok has recently put an aggressive bot into play called byte spider that is scraping data for its new search engine (as in up to a 25% lift in data traffic). One of our roles is to watch for these plays and block them so that the site speeds of our clients aren't adversely impacted.

Big smart money is always looking for an edge, and is almost always the first to take advantage of any arbitrage opportunity; it's no different with AI. Blackrock, Larry Finks large investment company that many class as one of the true global leaders along with Vanguard and State Street set up an AI based asset manager called Aladdin a decade ago. We all know that the two largest economies or asset bases are the US and China, it will likely surprise you to learn that Blackrock is the third with 21 trillion in assets under management all run by Aladdin. (Note this was the number in 2020 and it will be far larger by now). You can check out one of the articles on Aladdin here.

AI is truly a two edged sword, I'm reminded of the opening lines of The tale of two cities, " It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness" Many of you may remember the 2017 poisoning of Kim Jong-nam by the North Koreans at Kuala Lumpur airport, the VX nerve agent used was considered to be one of the most powerful man made toxins at the time.

In 2020 Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, a company that specialises in looking for new drug candidates for rare and communicable diseases, was invited to do a presentation. As a novel approach they put its AI-based MegaSyn software to work generating a list of toxic molecules that were similar to VX nerve agents.

The team ran their AI software overnight and came up with 40,000 substances, including not only VX but many other completely new potentially toxic substances. All it took was a bit of programming, open-source data, a 2015 Mac computer and less than six hours of machine time "It wasn't any different from something we had done before—use these generative models to generate hopeful new drugs." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-drug-discovery-systems-might-be-repurposed-to-make-chemical-weapons-researchers-warn/ They simply focused on a dark outcome, rather than a good outcome as a test case.

The big advantage of AI is the handling of large amounts of data 24/7, and its ability to now be self-learning. Medical researchers at MIT and Harvard used a technique called high-throughput drug screening to try and counter one of the three super bugs in hospitals that current anti-biotics can't effectively fight. They found 480 compounds that blocked the growth of the bacteria.

They fed that information into a computer and used it to train an AI algorithm. They then had the model screen more than 6,000 molecules, over the course of a few hours! They narrowed the search to 240 chemicals for lab testing, and then whittled the list down to nine of the best inhibitors of the bacteria. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/25/health/antibiotic-artificial-intelligence-superbug/index.html

This is all very powerful, and helps to show the incredible potential of AI if it's used for good, which sadly is a very big if.

Hint: ChatGPT offers a fast and effective way to create more meaningful content, and can take a lot of the angst and time out of upgrading to a fresh, modern and professional website.

Always happy to chat.

Kind regards,

Grant Goodger
CEO SiteSuite
DL: 8904 -7501