Meta alum launches AI biology model that simulates 500 million years of evolution

by | Jun 25, 2024 | Technology

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As the world continues to explore the potential of GPT-4o beating Claude 3.5 Sonnet, EvolutionaryScale, an AI research lab founded by former Meta engineers, who ran the company’s now-disbanded protein-folding team, is moving in a completely different domain: making biology programmable. 

The task sounds complicated, but the year-old company is already making waves. Today, it announced the launch of ESM3, a natively multimodal and generative language model that can follow prompts and design novel proteins. In tests, the model was able to generate a novel green fluorescent protein (esmGFP), which would have taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve naturally.

“esmGFP…has a sequence that is only 58% similar to the closest known fluorescent protein. From the rate of diversification of GFPs found in nature, we estimate that this generation of a new fluorescent protein is equivalent to simulating over 500 million years of evolution,” the company wrote in a pre-print paper posted on its website on Tuesday. 

In addition to the new model, which comes in three sizes, the startup announced it has raised $142 million in a seed round of funding, led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Lux Capital. AWS and Nvidia’s venture capital arm also participated in the round. The smallest model has also been open-sourced to accelerate research with the new models.

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Don’t miss OpenAI, Chevron, Nvidia, Kaiser Permanente, and Capital One leaders only at VentureBeat Transform 2024. Gain essential insights about GenAI and expand your network at this exclusive three day event. Learn More

As the world continues to explore the potential of GPT-4o beating Claude 3.5 Sonnet, EvolutionaryScale, an AI research lab founded by former Meta engineers, who ran the company’s now-disbanded protein-folding team, is moving in a completely different domain: making biology programmable. 

The task sounds complicated, but the year-old company is already making waves. Today, it announced the launch of ESM3, a natively multimodal and generative language model that can follow prompts and design novel proteins. In tests, the model was able to generate a novel green fluorescent protein (esmGFP), which would have taken hundreds of millions of years to evolve naturally.

“esmGFP…has a sequence that is only 58% similar to the closest known fluorescent protein. From the rate of diversification of GFPs found in nature, we estimate that this generation of a new fluorescent protein is equivalent to simulating over 500 million years of evolution,” the company wrote in a pre-print paper posted on its website on Tuesday. 

In addition to the new model, which comes in three sizes, the startup announced it has raised $142 million in a seed round of funding, led by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Lux Capital. AWS and Nvidia’s venture capital arm also participated in the round. The smallest model has also been open-sourced to accelerate research with the new models.

Countdown to VB Transform 2024

Join enterprise leaders in San Francisco from July 9 to 11 for our flagship AI event. Connect with peers, explore the opportunities and challenges of Generative AI, and learn how to integrate AI applications int …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]

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