AI Designer Babies? Thiel-Backed Startup Claims 14-Point IQ Boost A startup backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund says its latest model can sort IVF embryos by intelligence, with 14 IQ points between the top and bottom of a batch of ten. "AI is rapidly getting smarter.
Now, humanity can too," Nucleus Genomics founder Kian Sadeghi wrote on Sept. 18 , announcing Vitruvian, the company's newest set of "genetic optimization models." "Vitruvian's intelligence model can optimize embryo DNA for 14 IQ points - nearly a standard deviation," he said, adding that the models were trained on more than a million people and validated on more than 40,000 siblings.
Vitruvian doesn't edit DNA. It scores the embryos an IVF cycle has already produced, so parents can choose which one to implant. Besides intelligence, Nucleus has pitched comparisons of each embryo's height, eye and hair color, and risk of breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and autism.