Scientists are looking at the possibility of building AI that is capable of generating new life forms from DNA from scratch.
A bioengineering researcher and author Eric Nguyen in a Ted Talk video shared on 16 September said an AI model known as Evo which was trained on 80,000 genomes is like a ChatGPT for DNA.
Nguyen believes that the model will soon be able to generate new genetic blueprints for life.
How this is possible
Nguyen compared DNA to a language with grammar, structure, sentences and paragraphs that form a long story passed down through years of evolution.
He added that for human DNA, it has been difficult to comprehend because of how large it is, but that may be about to change.
A team of scientists and AI experts gathered the largest collection of DNA and used it to train Evo. They used 80,000 whole genomes to train the model with the goal of creating something like ChatGPT, but for DNA.
The scientists intend to make it possible to prompt the model by describing any kind of DNA and it will generate new sequences “one letter at a time”.
Nguyen said:
“So next we decided to go for that moonshot — try to generate a whole from scratch, and EVo generated hundreds of synthetic proteins in a genome that resembled those in Nature.”
While the first version of the DNA wasn’t complete but was like a rough sketch of a genome, Nguyen believes it could get more detailed and within years generate whole functional genomes and ultimately new life.
‘We’re all gonna die’
Redditors have responded to Nguyen’s presentation, with many describing it as scary and dangerous to the future of humanity.
One commented that we’re all going to die from a prion disease and it will be the presenters’ fault, while others don’t believe that AI can generate new life from scratch.
What do you think?
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