Dr. Richard Moulange

I must disagree strongly when people say nature is the world's worst bioterrorist.

That is not true.

We can do worse than nature.

This is true in all aspects of science.

There are so many examples where we engineer things better than nature has ever provided.

We can make materials that are much stronger than anything in nature.

That is not the ceiling.

And so we should be deeply concerned about the ability for AI to uplift, say, even the Russian Federation, to build things worse than we have ever seen on Earth.

Thank you, Rob.

It is absolutely great to be here.

I'm ready to hear all the criticisms.

This was some really impressive work and is really a step change, I think, in the AI biosecurity intersection domain.

So the model you're talking about is EVO2, and it's made by folks at ARC Institute in the US, which is one of the top places in the world now for making this kind of thing.

EVO2 is what we would call a genomic language model.

So much like LLMs, ChatGPT, CLAW, take your pick, process natural language.

EVO and EVO2 process the language of biology.

There are a number of different languages, but the one this one does is literally what are called base pairs, nucleotides, the A's, C's, G's, and T's that make up DNA and RNA that are the language of life.

And EVO2 is trained on many hundreds of thousands of genomes across lots of different types of organisms.

So it's not just humans or mammals.

There's fungi, there's plants, there's viruses and there are bacteria and a few other more esoteric ones too.