Sounds cool, but how you define success for something like that? I can copy a prokaryotic genome mutated based as some non-zero rate and it would probably be viable. Is that synthetic enough to count? Are they going for a minimal genome?
How about something more useful, lucrative, and easy to define success for like engineering a morphine synthesis pathway into E. coli or something.
Imo, if you are talking about synthetic biology, then their training data is insufficient. Synthetic bio explores a lot of design space that is far outside of anything you would see in nature. There the secret sauce would not be in the generative pretraining, but in the RL. Unfortunately bio experiments are noisy, slow, and expensive so good luck getting enough data before the heat death of the universe.
How about something more useful, lucrative, and easy to define success for like engineering a morphine synthesis pathway into E. coli or something.
Imo, if you are talking about synthetic biology, then their training data is insufficient. Synthetic bio explores a lot of design space that is far outside of anything you would see in nature. There the secret sauce would not be in the generative pretraining, but in the RL. Unfortunately bio experiments are noisy, slow, and expensive so good luck getting enough data before the heat death of the universe.