AI speeds scientific leaps
DeepMind’s new general‑purpose science AI is being described as “spectacular,” suggesting a step‑change in AI‑driven research capabilities (x.com). Separately, researchers are touting AI that can compress roughly seven years of genomic discovery into about 30 minutes — a claim that could radically accelerate drug and biotech pipelines (x.com).
DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve was introduced in a white paper in mid‑May 2025 as an “evolutionary coding agent” that orchestrates ensembles of Gemini models to generate, evaluate and iteratively improve full codebases for scientific and algorithmic problems. (deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-powered-coding-agent-for-designing-advanced-algorithms/). (deepmind.google) DeepMind reported AlphaEvolve has produced novel, provably correct algorithms, helped improve designs for Google’s tensor processing units, and identified more efficient ways to use Google’s global compute—changes the company quantified as saving about 0.7% of its total resources. (nature.com/d41586-025-01523-z). (nature.com) The team released a technical report and supporting code and notebooks (including a GitHub repository and colab examples) that document AlphaEvolve’s rediscovery of state‑of‑the‑art solutions across dozens of mathematical and algorithmic tasks. (arxiv.org/abs/2506.13131) (arxiv.org) Basecamp Research’s EDEN family of models was described in a bioRxiv preprint posted 12 January 2026 and is reported to have been trained on roughly 9.7 trillion biological tokens drawn from the company’s proprietary BaseData corpus. (biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.12.699009v1). (biorxiv.org) In preprint and company disclosures EDEN is credited with designing programmable gene‑insertion enzymes for over 10,000 disease‑relevant genomic sites and producing engineered T cells that cleared more than 90% of tumor cells in lab assays, while a separate design task yielded 32 of 33 functional antimicrobial peptides (a 97% hit rate). (biotechgrid.com/basecamp-research-achieves-programmable-gene-insertion-with-eden-ai-models/). (biotechgrid.com) Basecamp has paired EDEN with an infrastructure effort called the Trillion Gene Atlas—announced in March 2026 with partners including Anthropic, Ultima Genomics and PacBio—to collect genomic data from more than 100 million species and to accelerate data generation that the company says would otherwise take decades. (prnewswire.com/news-releases/basecamp-research-launches-trillion-gene-atlas-to-scale-ai-designed-therapeutics-302716632.html). (prnewswire.com)
