Stanford PhD student Samuel King used generative AI models to design the genetic blueprint of a microscopic virus. The report says this is not yet AI-generated life, but it could be the next step. MIT Technology Review senior AI reporter James O'Donnell will speak with him on October 16 about this work on AI-designed viruses, his selection for Innovators Under 35, and new ways of observing biology.
Import AIImport AI · Google DeepMind introduced SynthID Bio, a watermarking method designed specifically for synthetic biology, embedding detectable signals by adjusting amino acid sequences and the atomic coordinates of predicted 3D structures. In wet-lab tests on three target proteins—VEGF-A, the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein RBD, and PD-L1—the watermarked designs matched the unwatermarked versions in hit rate, binding affinity, and natural sequence diversity. Toby Ord's analysis suggests that AI swarms are a new form of inference scaling: a 4-agent swarm requires roughly twice the compute to achieve equivalent performance.
