AI eats science 2: life 2.0

Artificial intelligence is reinventing biology. Current models can untangle complex interactions inside cells, predict the structure of proteins and even design new ones. But Brian Hie, our guest today, has been pushing the frontier—using AI to generate complete organisms from scratch. His research group has already produced a virus that doesn’t exist in nature. How far can generative biology go?

In this series of four episodes, we bring you conversations with scientists who are deploying intelligent new tools in science—people who are thinking about how it could reinvent the way they discover new things and understand the world. Next time: the researcher with a plan to turn the entire scientific enterprise on its head.

Guests and hosts:

• Brian Hie of the Arc Institute and Stanford University
• Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor

Topics covered:

• Evo genome language model
• Artificial intelligence
• Biosecurity

Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.

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