Ginkgo-Google Cloud Partner on Protein LLM, Optimizing Microbial Communities with Computers + saRNA Vaccines?

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Ginkgo Bioworks has just announced a new service called the Ginkgo Model API. SynBioBeta founder and CEO John Cumbers interviewed Ankit Gupta, Head of AI at Ginkgo, to get the lowdown.

The API allows users to access public models like ESM2, as well as Ginkgo’s proprietary model, AA0, which is built on their data. Competitively priced, protein design and analysis costs just $0.18 per million amino acids analyzed.

“We want people to build on top of this API,” says Gupta, who joined the company as part of Ginkgo’s acquisition of Reverie Labs, a company he co-founded. Ginkgo is offering a million free tokens to help scientists get started. Customers can also customize their models by fine-tuning them with their data.

“A lot of the power comes from taking the general model and fine-tuning it for a particular application,” Gupta told me. One use case for synthetic biologists is taking a million sequences the model predicts might work and having the model identify the top 10,000 sequences, which you might then prioritize for synthesis and testing.

Ankit Gupta (top) chatting with John Cumbers

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