Scientists at Stanford and Arc Institute have created the first entirely new viruses designed by artificial intelligence, which in lab conditions successfully infected and destroyed bacteria. This breakthrough marks a new era in computational biology and opens the door to deeper genetic-level engineering of life.
The AI model, called Evo, was trained on a dataset of more than 2 million viruses and then tasked with independently designing new variants. Out of 302 attempts, 16 proved functional in laboratory tests. The designed viruses carried 392 mutations never before seen in nature, including combinations scientists had attempted — but failed — to create for years.
When bacteria developed resistance to natural viruses, AI-generated variants broke through their defenses in just a few days. One synthetic version even included a component from a distantly related virus — something researchers had long tried unsuccessfully to engineer.
As the Arc Institute summarized: moving from reading and writing genomes to designing them from scratch represents the start of an entirely new phase in humanity’s ability to engineer the very foundations of biology.
In brief: Tech World Highlights
- ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, plans a stock buyback from employees, valuing the company at over $330 billion.
- Prosecutors are seeking a 15-year prison sentence for Kakao founder Kim Beom-su, accused of stock manipulation during the takeover battle for SM Entertainment.
- Frontier, a carbon removal consortium backed by Google, committed $31.3M to buy credits for removing 115,211 metric tons of CO₂ from startup Planetary.
- Google introduced new AI features in Google Translate to help users learn new languages, inspired by Duolingo.
- Scientists developed a one-step process that turns mixed plastic waste into gasoline at room temperature and normal pressure with over 95% efficiency.
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