A study published in Science (via The New York Times) details how researchers used an AI model to design new viruses capable of infecting and reproducing inside bacteria. Scientists at Palo Alto's Arc Institute and Stanford University created the viruses with the genome language models Evo 1 and Evo 2. They work somewhat like large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT or Claude. For this experiment, the team further trained the models on about 15,000 viruses from the same family as Phi X-174, a tiny virus that only infects E. coli bacteria. They were at least as viable as Phi X-174, with some reproducing faster.