Nobel efforts: Sequencing human genomes is getting cheaper

10/4/22 8:00PM

Nobel efforts‍

‍Svante Pääbo, a Swedish scientist, has won the Nobel Prize for his reconstruction of a full genome for Neanderthals and other extinct hominins. Pääbo's prize, officially the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, carried a 10m Swedish Kronor prize (~$920k USD) and was the first of six awards that are being announced this week. The impressive work, which saw Pääbo pioneer methods to extract and analyze DNA from Neanderthal bones, is experimentation that will hopefully get easier over time, as the cost of genome sequencing continues to fall.

Indeed, Illumina — a company which has some 80% share of the global gene sequencing market — unveiled two new sequencing instruments this week. The company claims these tools will bring the cost of sequencing a full genome to less than $240 and give the company capacity to sequence ~20,000 genomes a year, up from 7,500. Tell those numbers to a scientist from the year 2000, when one human genome sequence would cost close to $100m, and they'd likely laugh you out of the lab.

‍The whole gene

‍What about that at-home DNA test kit you bought online? That only takes a snippet, usually around 0.02% of your DNA, using clues to predict your disease risks and ancestry.

Whole-genome sequencing, on the other hand, provides 4,000 times more data on your DNA than at-home tests, and is likely to lend a hand in major medical breakthroughs. The process helped the speedy creation of vaccines for Covid-19, can help the early detection of disease outbreaks, identify inherited disorders and even characterize genetic cell mutations in cancer patients.

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Microsoft shares dropped as it announced a revised agreement with OpenAI.

The amended agreement ends revenue-sharing payments from Microsoft to OpenAI, and also ends Microsoft’s exclusive access to OpenAI’s intellectual property (i.e. models and products).

OpenAI’s revenue sharing with Microsoft will end in 2030, is subject to a total cap, and is no longer dependent on its achieving artificial general intelligence.

Amazon, a likely beneficiary of this lack of exclusivity, initially popped on the news but erased those gains.

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Unlike its tech peers, which can sell AI through cloud services, Meta mainly uses AI to improve its existing ad business rather than as a stand-alone revenue driver. The decision strips away one of Meta’s clearest paths to monetizing AI — leaving it spending like a hyperscaler, without a hyperscaler business model.

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DeepSeek releases new V4 series models highlighting efficiency and long context

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released a major new version of its eponymous open-source AI models that are nipping at the heels of leading frontier models in some areas.

The most significant DeepSeek-V4 Pro and DeepSeek-V4 Flash both have a 1 million-token context — the amount of information the model can actively work with in a single session — which is a crucial feature for complex, long-running coding tasks.

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

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