Is Carbon-X state of the art?Pending benchmarks.Announced Oct 22, 2026; no independent results yet.
An open model from Hugging Face that takes raw DNA and natural language in one chat: it describes sequences, predicts whether a mutation is benign or pathogenic, and predicts the next bases of a sequence. The team says it has not been clinically validated. Apache 2.0 weights on Hugging Face.
The details so far
- Lab
- Hugging Face
- Announced
- Oct 22, 2026
- API
- Not yet
- Open weights
- Published
- Parameters
- 14.8B
- Lab
- Hugging Face, with Zhongguancun Academy and the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine / University of Naples Federico II (model card)
- Weights
- Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face (HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-X), BF16; fits one 80 GB GPU
- Base
- Qwen3-14B, mid-trained on 302B tokens of DNA, biology text, English and instruction data, then SFT and RL
- Tokenizer
- Qwen3 BPE for text plus 5,515 DNA tokens (non-overlapping 6-mers)
- Context
- 40,960 tokens; post-trained and evaluated with thinking disabled
- API
- None announced; runs locally with vLLM or Transformers
- Status
- Research model; not clinically validated and not for medical decisions (model card)
Tags marked unsure are not stated on the lab's own pages.
What would let us call it
Verdicts use only independent boards we already track. Two consecutive snapshots are required before any crown.
- Publicly announced with a source
- Usable by the public (API or weights)
- Listed on an independent board we track
- Enough results for a rank in a category
- Holds across two snapshots (crowns only)
What the lab claims
Self-reported. Shown for context; not used in any verdict.
Lab claim: 66.7% average across five DNA benchmarks with thinking disabled, 27 points above Qwen3-14B and close to GPT-6.1 Sol (67.5%) at about 1/1,800 of the inference cost per problem.
Sources
REPOCarbon-X model card on Hugging Facehuggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-X · Oct 22, 2026LABLoubna Ben Allal (Hugging Face) announcement on Xx.com/LoubnaBenAllal1/status/2113212025560023513 · Oct 22, 2026LABLewis Tunstall (Hugging Face) on Xx.com/_lewtun/status/2113214040516268126 · Oct 22, 2026Tracking continues until an independent board lists it.