Brian Hie

New Capabilities

Co-senior author on Evo 2

It took thirteen years and $2.7 billion to read the first human genome. Now a single AI model, trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs from more than 128,000 species, can predict whether an uncharacterized mutation in a breast cancer gene is dangerous—with 90 percent accuracy—without ever being shown that gene. On March 4, the Arc Institute and NVIDIA published Evo 2 in Nature, the largest biological foundation model ever built: 40 billion parameters, a context window of one million nucleotides, and the ability to design synthetic genomes the size of a simple bacterium.

Updated Mar 5

New Capabilities

Lead researcher on Evo model and synthetic phage project

Stanford and Arc Institute researchers used an AI called Evo to write genetic code for 302 bacteriophage viruses from scratch. Sixteen of them worked—they replicated, killed bacteria, and some even outperformed the natural virus they were modeled on. It's the first time a machine has successfully designed complete, functional genomes without human guidance on what genes to include or how to arrange them.

Updated Jan 7