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Eric Nguyen (@exnx) views the human genome as a 3-billion-letter program waiting to be decoded. Some changes to that program are harmless. But in critical locations, a single misspelled letter is all it takes to cause severe disease. The traditional approach to studying these mutations is slow and painstaking. Eric co-founded @RadicalNumerics to change the paradigm entirely: train large language models directly on raw DNA, and learn to read what the code actually does. It is a fundamental…
Mario Gabriele@mariogabrieleAug 4
What happens when AI can write the genetic code for life itself? Eric Nguyen (@exnx) is the co-founder of @RadicalNumerics, the lab behind the models that generated the first genome ever created entirely by AI, a bacteriophage that had never existed in nature until it wrote one. He believes DNA should be treated the way language is treated: something a model can read, then write. With more DNA sitting in public databases than there is text on the entire internet, he sees an almost unmined field, one where the models built to make sense of it remain, by his own admission, no more sophisticated than linear regression. Thank you to the partners who make this possible @ahrefs Brand Radar: Find your brand in AI results: https://ahrefs.com/generalist @brexHQ: The intelligent finance platform: https://www.brex.com/mario @Guru_HQ: The AI source of truth for work: (3:35) An overview of Radical Numerics (11:08) Why they started with DNA (26:24) The limits of language models in biology (31:15) Eric’s free-range upbringing and path to his PhD program (41:20) Applying long-context models to DNA and meeting his co-founders (55:30) How better general LLMs benefit Radical Numerics (1:02:05) Making biology more concrete (1:18:09) Final meditations
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