San Francisco (United States) (AFP) – The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a nonprofit launched by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife aimed at curing all disease, on Thursday announced it was restructuring to focus on using artificial intelligence to achieve that goal. The move narrows the focus of the philanthropic organization founded in 2015 with a vow to devote most of the couple’s significant wealth to charitable causes, including social justice and voter rights.
Zuckerberg is among the high-profile tech figures who has backed away from diversity, equality, and fact-checking initiatives after US President Donald Trump took office in January. The organization this year ended its diversity efforts, curbed support of nonprofits that provide housing, and stopped funding a primary school that gave education and health care to underserved children, according to media reports.
The philanthropic mission created by the Meta co-founder and his spouse, Priscilla Chan, said that its current priority involves scientific teams centralized in a facility called Biohub. “This is a pivotal moment in science, and the future of AI-powered scientific discovery is starting to come into view,” Biohub said in a blog post. “We believe that it will be possible in the next few years to create powerful AI systems that can reason about and represent biology to accelerate science.”
Biohub envisions AI helping advance ways to detect, prevent, and cure diseases, according to the post. The mission includes trying to model the human immune system, potentially opening a door to “engineering human health.” “We believe we’re on the cusp of a scientific revolution in biology — as frontier artificial intelligence and virtual biology give scientists new tools to understand life at a fundamental level,” Biohub said in the post.
The first investment announced by the Zuckerbergs when the initiative debuted nearly a decade ago was for the creation of a Biohub in Silicon Valley where researchers, scientists, and others could work to build tools to better study and understand diseases. Shortly after it was established, the initiative bought a Canadian startup which uses AI to quickly read and comprehend scientific papers and then provide insights to researchers. “Our multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers have built incredible technologies to observe, measure and program biology,” Biohub said of its progress.
Meta is among the big tech firms that have been pouring billions of dollars into data centers and more in a race to lead the field of AI.
© 2024 AFP
