Comment by adrian_b
19 hours ago
In another HN thread about this AlphaGenome Atlas, someone has posted a link to:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mutate-em-all-and-...
which comments the results of this study:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.25.740675v1
That study has done in reality what the AlphaGenome Atlas does in fiction, but instead for a human they have done it for one of the simplest viruses.
So they have fuzzed the virus by mutating one by one each position of its DNA.
And various dedicated AI models all made poor predictions of the results of that experiment, which casts doubts about the value of the AlphaGenome predictive map.
A virus is much simpler than a human, but even for that simple virus the effects of most of the mutations could not be predicted. A half of the mutations had harmful effects, and for a half of those it is unknown for now why they were harmful.
For a human the uncertainty about the effects of a mutation will be far greater than for one of the simplest viruses.
> And various dedicated AI models all made poor predictions of the results of that experiment, which casts doubts about the value of the AlphaGenome predictive map
I would not group AlphaGenome into the pile of failed predictions of other models. AlphaGenome deserves to get evaluated based off its own merits.
Yep. Sequence-to-function models are still very limited. AlphaGenome Atlas, despite the flashy branding, is unlikely to provide significant benefit to researchers.
May be that's the reason for the alpha naming. We are waiting for a stable release (just kidding).
And it makes a lot of sense why they are limited. DNA is not an instruction set. It's more like a heavily encrypted dataset where the encryption key is the totality of physics and biology. The interactions with the physical world that result in the end product of life are enormously (it would seem hopelessly) complex.
For a machine intelligence to turn DNA sequences into organisim phenotype prediction requires modelling all that in latent space.
I imagine that is going to take a monumental amount of example data