That analogy doesn’t really hold up to the “Therefore.”

There are LOTS of things that taste worse than water, and yet are critical to cooking. Vanilla extract, oil, soy sauce, etc. I personally don’t like fish, but a little bit in the right context can be delicious.

I did not say all deep learning algorithms are LLMs, I said all LLMs are deep learning algorithms. It’s a nested hierarchy, that relationship only runs one way.

Yes. Evo was trained on text strings of genomic data. That’s what I was trying to say was the misunderstanding. LLMs do not require language as you and I would recognize it. If you think that calling them “Large Language Models,” is misleading, I kinda agree, but then we can start arguing semantics about why scientists name anything the way they do. Dark matter isn’t actually dark, and probably isn’t matter. Dark energy isn’t dark. There was no explosion during the big bang.

If you’re using colloquial word usage and demanding scientific advances follow your expectations, you’re going to have a bad time.

But let’s just say for the sake of argument that you’re 100% correct, and that Evo is not an LLM. Rather, it’s something extremely close, save for a few differences.

People are already angry at the researchers for “Using AI to develop super-bugs,” or saying the genuinely universal “AI has no uses!” And earnestly failing to differentiate between the shit-bot that makes deep-fakes, and the AI designed to identify cancers.

That is why I absolutely reject your disrespectful framing that by defending a technology, and NOT it’s worst uses, I’m somehow opposite to “care(ing) for humanity.”

The actual technology behind Evo and ChatGPT is structurally the same. The methods of training a model on genomic data or weather patterns is indistinguishable from training it on stolen media. The difference is the uses, and targets.

This is my point. They are LLMs. That is not an opinion or a debatable point. They are categorically, definitionally, LLMs. You don’t understand what LLMs are, because LLMs ARE deep learning models, and instead of taking the time to actually learn about the technology you’re responding to my corrections with hostility.

You and I are on the same side. Chat-bots ARE harmful. But putting that label on a technology as a whole is purely tribe-based fear that is already causing the spread of unfounded fear and misinformation.

And the claim wasn’t “Don’t use AI as a source of information,” which I agree with. It was “Don’t use any AI,” which you clarified to mean LLMs. So this is very much pertinent.

Then you don’t actually understand what LLMs are, and you’re using the term as a short-hand to mean chat bots. I’m not trying to be rude, but you need to understand that is just a fact, if you think LLMs can only be chat-bots, and can only be corporate, and can only be trained unethically.

Would it surprise you to know that quite a lot of genuine advances have been made by using LLMs that don’t speak any language you’d recognize? Evo 1 and Evo 2 for example “Speak” genome sequences. There are other models that have been used to improve weather modeling, and animal behaviour analysis.

You’re right that AI is a very broad term, but so is LLM. The problem is that ignorant people see “AI” and automatically assume it’s bad because of the connotation with Chat-Bots.

By AI do you mean LLMs specifically? All LLMs, or just the corporate ones? Because I fully agree that ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. truly are awful. But this is also catching genuinely useful technological advances in with the wide net. AI isn’t just LLMs, LLMs aren’t just chat bots. And claiming a technologies worst implementations are indicative of the entire tech would see just about every single technology ever made fall in the same category.

No, that’s not true. Universities have been making their own models. Private individuals have been making their own models. The most famous ones are, of course, purely corporate. But claiming that the tech is inseparable from the corporation is demonstrably incorrect.

Evo 2 was recently used in a revolutionary antibiotic research paper, which is entirely open source and trained and public data. Is that also corporate?

This is wildly incorrect. If by AI you mean exclusively modern LLMs, then it would effectively halt quite a lot of modern research, including virology, epidemiology, physics, materials sciences, and many more.

If by AI you mean the actual definition of AI, then you can say goodbye to the Internet as we know it today. Translation services, fraud protection, GPS, 99.9% of all software development, etc. nobody had a problem with AI ~5 years ago. Those exact same algorithms are now flagged as evil because people misunderstand what they’re even complaining about.

The impossibility of removing the Internet is identical to the impossibility of removing AI. Or, if you use the incorrect term to mean LLMs exclusively, then say goodbye to quite a lot of critical modern research. I hope you don’t like antibiotics, because there was a recent breakthrough that used Evo 1 and Evo 2, both LLMs trained on genome data.

The same can be said about LITERALLY every technology ever made. Everything you listed is real, problems that need to be addressed, and the companies responsible for exacerbating them held accountable.

A technologies worst implementations are not representative of its usefulness.

Unless you want to ban the entire field of biology as well for the atrocities committed associated with it.