Google Taught an AI That Sorts Cat Photos to Analyze DNA

When Mark DePristo and Ryan Poplin began their work, Google’s artificial intelligence did not know anything about genetics. In fact, it was a neural network created for image recognition—as in the neural network that identifies cats and dogs in photos uploaded to Google. It had a lot to learn.

But just eight months later, the neural network received for accurately identifying mutations in DNA sequences. And in just a year, a standard human-coded algorithm called GATK. DePristo and Poplin would know;