Researchers developed an AI capable of copying evolution itself. This doesn’t mean the AI created some sort of evolutionary superior superhuman (yet), but instead, the AI designed sequences of 20 amino acids that make up proteins. When compared to nature’s handiwork, some of the sequences worked just as well as ones generated over millions of years of evolution.

Interestingly, scientists didn’t design an AI from scratch, but rather, repurposed one from an unlikely field: a language model. Researchers used natural language-processing abilities and focused on the “sentences” of biological proteins—essentially a language of amino acids.

“In the same way that words are strung together one-by-one to form text sentences, amino acids are strung together one-by-one to make proteins”

Overall, Salesforce estimates that 73 percent of ProGen’s proteins could function, compared to 59% of natural proteins, and found that the AI was also able to detect evolutionary patterns (though it wasn’t specifically designed to)

TLDR: Singularity is just around the corner.