Hugging Face’s New AI Biology Model Lets You Chat With DNA

The AI platform Hugging Face on Thursday released a new open-source model for understanding DNA that can run locally on a laptop.

Developed in collaboration with researchers at Zhongguancun Academy in China and the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, the model is trained on genomic sequences and natural language so that people can ask questions about the effects of DNA changes on gene activity and health and get conversational answers in return.

Lewis Tunstall, a senior research scientist at Hugging Face, says the tool is meant to help researchers design new drugs and genetic therapies, and it could potentially aid patients in interpreting their own genomes.

“We've unlocked a new capability in language models, which is fundamentally about being able to chat with DNA,” he says of the new model, dubbed Carbon-X. Using natural language means even nontechnical users “can actually ask questions about DNA that wouldn't be accessible through any other tool.”

Known as essentially GitHub for AI models, Hugging Face provides a library of readymade AI tools and a platform for running primarily open-weight and open-source AI applications for developers, researchers, businesses, and people who want to experiment with AI without building everything from scratch. In September, Nvidia agreed to acquire the company for nearly $13 billion. (Hugging Face was also at the center of a major hack by OpenAI’s models earlier this year.)

DNA is more like computer code than natural language. Instead of 0s and 1s, though, it uses As, Cs, Gs, and Ts to encode information. A human genome contains 6 billion of these letters. While the human genome has been sequenced end to end, scientists still don’t understand how most of it works.

Carbon-X integrates both DNA and natural language in a conversational interface. Think of it like a ChatGPT for DNA.