Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced a major restructuring of their philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), on Thursday, now focusing on artificial intelligence to accelerate discoveries in biology and medicine.
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan PHOTO: EPA EFE
According to the announcement made Thursday evening by Mark Zuckerberg, CZI acquired the team of the startup EvolutionaryScale, specialized in AI for the sciences, establishing a new organization, called Biohub.
The organization also announced a tenfold increase in computing capacity by 2028 to support projects such as virtual maps of cells, language models for biological reasoning and AI for analyzing genetic sequences in disease detection, writes Mediafax.
Zuckerberg explained that the decision reflects their desire to invest in a field with long-term impact.
“When we started, our goal was to help scientists cure or prevent all diseases this century. With advances in AI, we now believe this could be possible much sooner.” he relayed.
The CZI organization, which was founded in 2015 and has given out more than $7 billion in grants, has scaled back its involvement in education and social initiatives in recent months.
Through Biohub, CZI aims to enable large-scale virtual experiments, accelerating the pace of medical discovery far beyond what is possible in current laboratories.
