Scientists today released what they say is the biggest-ever artificial-intelligence (AI) model for biology. The model — which was trained on 128,000 genomes spanning the tree of life, from humans to single-celled bacteria and archaea — can write whole chromosomes and small genomes from scratch. It can also make sense of existing DNA, including hard-to-interpret ‘non-coding’ gene variants that are linked to disease. Evo-2, co-developed by researchers at the Arc Institute and Stanford University, both in Palo Alto, California, and chip maker NVIDIA, is available to scientists through web interfaces or they can download its freely available software code, data and other parameters needed to replicate the model. The developers see Evo-2 as a platform that others can adapt to their own uses. “We’re really looking forward to how scientists and engineers build this ‘app store’ for biology,” Patrick Hsu, a bioengineer at the Arc Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, said at a press briefing announcing Evo-2’s launch. Other scientists are impressed with what they’ve read about the model — which is described in a paper posted to the Arc Institute website and submitted to the bioRxiv preprint server. But they say they will need to kick the tyres before coming to firm conclusions.

Full report : Nvidia and the Arc Institute just dropped a really, really big AI bio model called Evo 2.