Arc Institute

Biography

Arc Institute is a nonprofit biomedical research organization based in Palo Alto, California, that funds long-horizon work in biology outside the usual grant cycle. It operates in partnership with Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, and gives its investigators multi-year support so they can pursue projects that are hard to justify on short funding timelines. Its highest-profile computational work is the Evo family of genome language models, which are trained on DNA sequence rather than text and can read and generate genomic sequence at scales from individual genes to whole genomes. That work sits at the center of an ongoing debate over generative biology, where the same models that speed up research also raise biosecurity questions. For AI and tech readers, Arc is one of the clearest examples of foundation model methods moving out of language and into the life sciences. Our coverage has followed its work on AI-generated virus genomes, sixteen of which proved viable in the lab.

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