We’ve done a lot of looking over our shoulders at OpenAI. Who will cross the next milestone? What will the next move be?
But the uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.
I’m talking, of course, about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us. Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today.
pysam - Pysam is a Python module for reading and manipulating SAM/BAM/VCF/BCF files. It's a lightweight wrapper of the htslib C-API, the same one that powers samtools, bcftools, and tabix.
genome-maps - An open-source high-performance web-based HTML5 genome browser. Genome Maps can be customized and allow browsing user data such as BAM and VCF files among other formats.
M. Glauer, S. Günther, L. Huelk, and W. Bunke. InviroInfo—From Science to Society: The Bridge Provided by Environmental Informatics: Adjunct Proceedings of the 31st Edition of the EnviroInfo (2017)