ESM3 Simulates 500 Million Years of Evolution to Create New
Fluorescent Protein
EvolutionaryScale, a frontier AI research lab for biology,
launched today with ESM3, a milestone AI model capable of
generating novel proteins. ESM3 generated a new Green Fluorescent
Protein (GFP), a process that would take 500 million years of
evolution to occur naturally. This milestone generative AI model
allows interactive prompting to create proteins, empowering
scientists to advance applications from drug discovery, and
materials science, to carbon capture.
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Fluorescent protein esmGFP // Created
with ESM3. (Photo: Business Wire)
The founding team at EvolutionaryScale and behind ESM3 are
pioneers in applying AI to biology, building what is widely
considered to be the first transformer language model for proteins
ESM1. The ESM models have empowered groundbreaking scientific
research, including a breakthrough in protein folding that helped
reveal the structures of hundreds of millions of metagenomic
proteins; the models have been used by scientists across the world
to model and understand proteins.
EvolutionaryScale described ESM3 today in a scientific preprint
and released an open version of the model for scientific
researchers (links below).
The Frontier Language Model for Biology
ESM3 was trained with 1 trillion teraflops – more compute than
any other known model in biology – on a dataset of 2.78 billion
proteins across the Earth’s natural diversity. It is the first
generative model for biology that simultaneously reasons over the
sequence, structure and function of proteins. This enables
scientists to understand and create new proteins, making biology
programmable.
“ESM3 takes a step toward a future of biology where AI is a tool
to engineer from first principles, the way we engineer structures,
machines, and microchips, and write computer programs,” said
EvolutionaryScale co-founder and chief scientist, Alexander Rives.
“We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we’re excited to
share it with the scientific community and see what they do with
it.”
With this capability, the model has the potential to accelerate
discovery across a broad range of applications, ranging from the
development of new cancer treatments to creating proteins that
could help capture carbon.
Simulating 500 Million Years of Evolution with a Language
Model
Prompted through a chain of thought to reason over possible
sequences and structures of GFP, ESM3 stepped across 500 million
years of evolution to create a new fluorescent protein. GFP is one
of the most beautiful and unique proteins in nature, responsible
for the glowing of jellyfish and the vivid fluorescent colors of
coral. It is the only protein that emits light, and the biological
mechanism for this is unique – it is a protein that transforms
itself forming a light emitting chromophore out of its own
atoms.
GFP has become an important tool in molecular biology, helping
scientists to see molecules inside cells. The mechanism that powers
this phenomenon is incredibly complex, and generating a variant
this distant by computational or experimental laboratory techniques
has not been scientifically documented. New fluorescent proteins
this distant from known ones have only been found through the
discovery of new GFPs in the natural world. Our analysis suggests
that under natural evolution it could take more than 500 million
years for a protein this different to evolve.
ESM3: A Tool for Scientists
ESM3’s success in generating a new GFP underscores the model’s
potential for advancements in biological research and life
sciences.
EvolutionaryScale will be opening an API for closed beta today
and code and weights are available for a small open version of ESM3
for non-commercial use. EvolutionaryScale is also collaborating
with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NVIDIA to accelerate
applications from drug discovery to synthetic biology with AI.
By working with AWS, Evolutionary Scale is making the full ESM3
model family easily accessible to hundreds of thousands of
researchers around the world and nine out of the top ten global
pharma companies, who already use AWS’s generative AI and health
services — Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, and AWS HealthOmics.
This move will make it easier for researchers to fine-tune the ESM3
models using their own proprietary data securely, and at scale.
All versions of ESM3 will be optimized for training and
inference performance through the company’s ongoing collaboration
with NVIDIA, including NVIDIA BioNeMo NIMs to accelerate runtime
performance and support through the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software
license and at ai.nvidia.com.
Closes More Than $142 Million in Seed Funding
EvolutionaryScale also announced a seed round of more than $142
million, led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and Lux Capital,
with participation from Amazon, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital
arm) and angel investors. Funding will be used to further expand
the capabilities of its models.
A link to the ESM3 release blog post describing the preprint
paper can be found on our website at
https://www.evolutionaryscale.ai/blog/esm3-release.
About EvolutionaryScale
EvolutionaryScale is a frontier AI research lab and Public
Benefit Corporation dedicated to developing artificial intelligence
for the life sciences. EvolutionaryScale’s models support
groundbreaking research and development in health, environmental
science, and beyond. The company was founded in July 2023 and has
raised more than $142 million in seed funding led by Nat Friedman
and Daniel Gross, and Lux Capital, with participation from Amazon,
NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm) and angel investors. For
more information, visit https://evolutionaryscale.ai
Working at Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) unit,
EvolutionaryScale’s founding team built ESM1 in 2019 which is
widely recognized to be the first large language model (LLM) for
proteins. EvolutionaryScale’s founding team left Meta in April
2023, starting EvolutionaryScale to develop and launch a next
generation model, ESM3.
EvolutionaryScale is committed to developing artificial
intelligence for the benefit of human health and society, through
open, safe, and responsible research, and in partnership with the
scientific community. The scientific team behind the ESM models are
among the more than 160 signatories across the world, committed to
advancing a framework for responsible development. For more
information, please visit:
https://responsiblebiodesign.ai/#supporters
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evolutionaryscale@thisisoutcast.com