A Peter Thiel-backed startup says its AI can find a 14-point IQ gap between your embryos. Here’s what the experts say.

November 15, 2026

By Kim Komando

In 1978, the world met Louise Brown, the first baby born through IVF. Critics called it playing God. Today, about 2 out of every 100 American babies start in a lab, and nobody blinks.

Picking pieces of a baby is already a thing. A friend of mine chose his egg donor from an online catalog, and it was wild. Photos, height, GPA, even essays on why each young woman wanted to donate. (Think dating app but with transcripts.) He picked a tall, gorgeous volleyball player with a 4.0 at an Ivy League school.

A New York startup wants to take the next step. Its pitch went up all over a Manhattan subway station: “Have your best baby.”

🧬 How embryo scoring works

The company is Nucleus Genomics. Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s venture firm, is one of its investors. Here’s the process:

1. A couple goes through IVF and ends up with several embryos.
2. They send Nucleus the DNA data for up to 20 of them.
3. AI reads more than 7 million spots in each embryo’s DNA and compares them to what it learned from more than a million people.
4. Every embryo gets scored on things like disease risk, IQ and eye color.
5. The parents pick which one gets implanted.

Price tag? About $6,000, on top of IVF. And there’s no gene editing. Nucleus ranks them. It doesn’t rewrite them.

This fall, the company said its newest AI can find a 14-point IQ gap between embryos. The founder’s pitch: “AI is rapidly getting smarter. Now, humanity can, too.”

🤔 Read the fine print

That 14 points is the gap between the best and worst embryo in a batch, not a bonus for your baby. One outside analysis put the real edge over an average embryo closer to 5 points.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the fertility doctors’ group, says this testing shouldn’t be offered to patients yet.

In September, the ad industry’s watchdog told Nucleus to change ads suggesting it can accurately pick the highest-IQ embryo.

Me? I’m uneasy. A child isn’t a spreadsheet, and kindness, grit and a good sense of humor don’t show up on a DNA score.

But IVF once sounded wild, too. My bet: This becomes normal faster than any of us expect.

Going through IVF? Ask your doctor what a score actually predicts, how it was tested on real siblings and what they’d do.

My grandfather was told a joke about genetics. My dad didn’t get it, but I did.

🗣️ Text/post this stat: A startup will score your IVF embryos for IQ with AI for about $6,000, and the fertility doctors’ own group says it shouldn’t be offered yet. GetKim.com

📩 Send this to someone who is going through IVF, or who loves a good dinner-table debate.