Hugging Face open-sources DNA model Carbon-X, mid-trained on Qwen3-14B
Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue announced the open-source DNA model Carbon-X, obtained by mid-training Qwen3-14B on 300B tokens of DNA, English, and interleaved data, using a hybrid tokenizer with BPE for English and a 6-mer tokenizer for DNA. The model surpasses all open-source language models it evaluated on five DNA understanding and generation benchmarks, improving on Qwen3-14B by 27 points, with API costs 1,800 times lower than GPT 6.1 Sol. The model is released on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license.
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Hugging Face's co-founder personally explains Carbon-X's training data and evaluation results, so readers can understand the gap and cost between open-source DNA models and closed-source frontier models.
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Frontier labs are advancing the capabilities in AI for biology but preventing the good guys (scientists, academia, non-profits, health agencies,...) to use, study and understand it with widespread but shallow guardrails that the bad guys are bypassing easily (blocked me to proofread this tweet for example 😅).
This will automatically create massive assymetry and risks in the coming years, just like in cybersecurity, especially now that frontier labs are building wet labs (HF cybersecurity scenario for biology when?).
This is why we created Carbon-X, the best open-source DNA model by midtraining Qwen3-14B on 300B tokens of DNA, English and interleaved data. We also used a hybrid tokenizer that tokenizes English with BPE and DNA with a 6-mer tokenizer.
As a result, Carbon-X outperforms all open language models we evaluated on five benchmarks of DNA understanding and generation. This is a 27-point improvement over Qwen3-14B, showing how much a language model can gain from DNA training. It is also API frontier level at 1,800x less cost than GPT 6.1 Sol!
We hope Carbon-X helps researchers explore DNA in new ways. Releasing it openly means anyone can study its capabilities, limitations, and risks. Let's make the AI biology frontier open-source to make it safe and impactful for the whole world (not just a few companies).
Apache 2.0 Model on @huggingface: https://t.co/RRc1VLSrGT