# Hugging Face releases Carbon-X, a Qwen3.5 14B model trained to reason over DNA

> Original title: The good news: you can mid-train yourself to the frontier!

- Source: Leandro von Werra
- Published: 2026-10-22T14:37:51.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/vlhl4w475fabduopvikpy9ml3
- Original: https://x.com/lvwerra/status/2113278666507485349

## Summary

Leandro von Werra says the Hugging Face team mid- and post-trained Qwen3.5 14B on natural language and DNA sequences to reason over DNA. He claims the model beats other open models and performs on par with the best frontier models, at a fraction of the cost and without distillation. The model is available as Carbon-X on Hugging Face, and the full recipe is being released.

## Post

The good news: you can mid-train yourself to the frontier! 

At a fraction of the cost! Without distillation!

What we did: We took Qwen3.5 14B and mid- and post-trained it to beat every other open model and perform as well as the very best frontier models. 

This is no simple toy task or format fixing, we are training the model to understand and reason over DNA sequences. Bio is the next frontier for AI and universal access will be crucial to make progress.

The fun part: because we train the model on both natural language and DNA sequences you can actually 'chat to your DNA': Ask it questions, ponder the impact of mutations, or ask it to generate a small sequence. 

We'll soon see the frontier labs move away from math and cyber towards bio. It already started, and we believe researchers should have access to capable models.

We are releasing the full recipe, so you can do it, too!

Model: https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-X

Blog: https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceBio/Carbon-X-Release

[Video](https://badinfluence.news/api/img-proxy?u=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Famplify_video_thumb%2F2113272487857299456%2Fimg%2FquIeNS3RH2-Aerb0.jpg&mode=thumb&exp=1793404800&sig=d7b9b61fbb5ba08f)