Buried in the paper that made headlines for producing the first AI-written viral genomes is a stranger result than the headline suggests. The models did not simply reshuffle what evolution had already tried. They wrote genetic solutions that appear nowhere in any known natural sequence, and several of them worked.
The study, published in Science by Samuel King, Brian Hie, and colleagues at Stanford University and the Arc Institute, used the genome language models Evo 1 and Evo 2 to design complete bacteriophage genomes. Sixteen of them booted up inside E. coli and killed it.
