Wired: AI is not yet ready to decode the complexity of genomes

Wired, in a report originally published in Quanta Magazine, says artificial intelligence is not yet ready to understand the complexity of the human genome. Although the sequence of roughly 3 billion DNA building blocks is known and fewer than 2 percent correspond to genes, the central challenge is understanding how those genes are regulated and activated in different cell types and in response to the environment.

Genomic foundation models such as Evo 2, Genos, and AlphaGenome are trained on large volumes of data and can predict how differences in DNA sequence affect biological processes and traits such as disease risk. The report notes, however, that these systems infer correlations and operate as black boxes; the available data also do not yet capture all of the genome’s three-dimensional and regulatory dynamics. For researchers seeking to understand how life works, predictions without explanations may not be enough.