Hugging Face releases Carbon-X, an open model that lets you chat with DNA
Hugging Face's open Carbon-X model lets researchers chat with DNA on a laptop, but its predictions have not been validated in wet lab experiments.
Hugging Face on Thursday released Carbon-X, an open-source model that answers plain-English questions about how DNA changes may affect gene activity and health, WIRED reported. It was developed with researchers at Zhongguancun Academy in China and the University of Naples Federico II in Italy.
The numbers: WIRED reports 14 billion parameters; Tunstall says the model was designed to run locally without sending data to Hugging Face or another company. (Hugging Face's own repository lists Carbon-X and Carbon-X-GGUF as 15B, and the discrepancy is unexplained.) The team started from an existing language model, which WIRED does not name, taught it to read DNA in six-letter groups, and trained on 300 billion tokens of DNA, English text and examples linking the two. Viruses were left out on purpose. It accepts roughly 50,000 base pairs at a time, so no whole human genomes.
Lewis Tunstall, a senior research scientist at Hugging Face, says: "We've unlocked a new capability in language models, which is fundamentally about being able to chat with DNA."
Context: Google DeepMind's AlphaGenome, released last year, predicts the effects of DNA sequences in a numeric format and needs more compute, according to WIRED.
My take: the developers say they have not validated Carbon-X with wet lab experiments, so they cannot say how accurate it is. A model that answers fluently about your genome, with no accuracy figure attached, has solved the interface and skipped the exam. Show me the eval, not the vibe.
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Sources
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
A chat window for the genome, from a company Nvidia agreed in September to buy for nearly $13 billion. Darling, that is how you accessorize an acquisition!
Open weights, runs on a laptop, a GGUF build is already in the repo. Hardware requirements are not stated, so check your RAM before you get excited.
