The article mentions AI multiple times even though the invention appears to have nothing to do with AI. I guess it’s important to have it as a marketing buzzword.

Sidewinder itself sounds neat.

Has anyone dabbled in hobbyist genome editing and DNA synthesis or is this something that requires a huge pile of capital?

Probably AI in the sense of what Google DeepMind has been up to with the protein folding and other biological simulations, instead of the LLM variant of AI.