Evo (AI)

Evo is a family of open-source foundation models designed to process and generate genomic sequences at single-nucleotide resolution. First developed by researchers at the Arc Institute, Stanford and UC Berkeley, the original Evo model and its successor, Evo 2, were trained directly on raw DNA sequences. The first version of Evo 1 was released as v.0.1.1 on February 27, 2024. The most recent version, which was released on February 28, 2026, is Evo 2 20B which is a version of Evo 2 with a reduced footprint so that it will run on a single H100 GPU. The datasets used for training Evo 1 and 2 were OpenGenome1 and OpenGenome2 respectively. The first dataset was 300 billion base pairs of bacteria and phage DNA. The second was over 26 times larger, with 8.8 trillion base pairs covering all forms of life. In 2026, a paper was published in Science detailing the use of Evo to generate complete genomes for new bacteriophage viruses which were more effective in some ways than their natural equivalents. This capability to design and generate viral genomes was thought to be a significant safety risk.