Carbon-X can analyze DNA sequences while running on your laptop at home.

A new AI model can connect DNA to human language, enabling scientists to interact with genetic code in new ways. Hugging Face announced the Carbon-X model on Thursday as the latest and most powerful in the company’s Carbon family, a group of AI models built to analyze DNA. 

“Carbon-X allows researchers to ‘chat with DNA’ for the first time: They can provide a sequence and ask questions about it in natural language,” Hugging Face research scientist Lewis Tunstall told CNET via email.

The word “chat” doesn’t mean talking to your genome but rather using an AI as a conversational interface, allowing users to paste in a DNA sequence, ask a question in plain English and receive back an interpretation, prediction or explanation — like a chatbot for DNA analysis.

The most popular chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, are cloud-based models that don’t run on your computer. The processing happens remotely, and you get the results back. But if you’re working on confidential or proprietary research that you haven’t yet published, you might not want to share it with an AI company. “Researchers need models they can study, adapt and run with sensitive or unpublished sequences on their own hardware,” said Tunstall.

One of the nice things about smaller, specialized AI models like Carbon-X is that it can run without using someone else’s computer. Hugging Face says the model can also work in tandem with other AI agents.

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