{"id":167725,"date":"2023-07-18T00:23:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-18T05:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/the-next-frontier-for-large-language-models-is-biology"},"modified":"2023-07-18T00:23:00","modified_gmt":"2023-07-18T05:23:00","slug":"the-next-frontier-for-large-language-models-is-biology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/the-next-frontier-for-large-language-models-is-biology","title":{"rendered":"The Next Frontier For Large Language Models Is Biology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-next-frontier-for-large-language-models-is-biology2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Large language models like GPT-4 have taken the world by storm thanks to their astonishing command of natural language. Yet the most significant long-term opportunity for LLMs will entail an entirely different type of language: the language of biology.<\/p>\n<p>One striking theme has emerged from the long march of research progress across biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics over the past century: it turns out that biology is a decipherable, programmable, in some ways even <em>digital<\/em> system.<\/p>\n<p>DNA encodes the complete genetic instructions for every living organism on earth using just four variables\u2014A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine) and T (thymine). Compare this to modern computing systems, which use two variables\u20140 and 1\u2014to encode all the world\u2019s digital electronic information. One system is binary and the other is <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Quaternary_numeral_system\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"\" title=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Quaternary_numeral_system\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\" aria-label=\"quaternary\">quaternary<\/a>, but the two have a surprising amount of conceptual overlap; both systems can properly be thought of as digital.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Large language models like GPT-4 have taken the world by storm thanks to their astonishing command of natural language. Yet the most significant long-term opportunity for LLMs will entail an entirely different type of language: the language of biology. One striking theme has emerged from the long march of research progress across biochemistry, molecular biology [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":359,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,1523,412],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-computing","category-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}