HAI Seminar with Brian Hie: Genome Modeling & Design Across All Domains of Life

All of life encodes information with DNA. While tools for sequencing, synthesis, and editing of genomic code have transformed biological research, intelligently composing new biological systems would also require a deep understanding of the immense complexity encoded by genomes. At the first Stanford HAI seminar of the academic year, assistant professor of chemical engineering, Brian Hie, introduced Evo 2, an open-source biological foundation model trained on 9.3 trillion DNA base pairs from a curated genomic atlas across all domains of life. He highlighted how Evo 2 learns from DNA sequence to predict the functional impacts of genetic variation and generates genome-scale sequences with greater naturalness and coherence than earlier methods. This seminar was recorded on September 30, 2025 at Stanford University.