🔬Bio-security is an AI Arms Race - Eric Nguyen (CEO, Radical Numerics)
Eric Nguyen, CEO and co-founder of Radical Numerics and creator of the Evo models, joins hosts Brandon and R.J. Honiki to discuss the evolution of genome language models from HyenaDNA to Omni. He explains how mid-training alignment, mechanistic interpretability, and in silico biological chain-of-thought reasoning enable DNA foundation models to outperform specialized tools on disease-variant prediction and molecular design. Nguyen also outlines why frontier bio labs must maintain a dual mandate in biosecurity, building AI-native functional defense systems to counter an emerging arms race in biological sequence generation.
- Pre-training on raw DNA created models that could read and write biology, but raw base models consistently lagged behind narrow specialized tools on human disease-variant prediction. Read →
- Radical Numerics uses mechanistic interpretability from language modeling to inspect what genomic foundation models learn during self-supervised pre-training. Read →
- Protein-coding regions make up only 1.5% to 2% of the human genome, leaving 98% of genetic variation in poorly understood non-coding regulatory sequences. Read →