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Title: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Shifts Bulk of Philanthropy, 'Going All In
on AI-Powered Biology'

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/11/08/0...

The Associated Press reports that "For the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan
and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a
lofty goal - 'to cure, prevent or manage all disease' - if not in their
lifetime, then in their children's." During that decade they also funded
other initiatives (including underprivileged schools and immigration reform),
according to the article. But there's a change coming: Now, the billionaire
couple is shifting the bulk of their philanthropic resources to Biohub, the
pair's science organization, and focusing on using artificial intelligence to
accelerate scientific discovery. The idea is to develop virtual, AI-based
cell models to understand how they work in the human body, study inflammation
and use AI to "harness the immune system" for disease detection, prevention
and treatment. "I feel like the science work that we've done, the Biohub
model in particular, has been the most impactful thing that we have done. So
we want to really double down on that. Biohub is going to be the main focus
of our philanthropy going forward," Zuckerberg said Wednesday evening at an
event at the Biohub Imaging Institute in Redwood City, California.... Chan
and Zuckerberg have pledged 99% of their lifetime wealth - from shares of
Meta Platforms, where Zuckerberg is CEO - toward these efforts... On
Thursday, Chan and Zuckerberg also announced that Biohub has hired the team
at EvolutionaryScale, an AI research lab that has created large-scale AI
systems for the life sciences... Biohub's ambition for the next years and
decades is to create virtual cell systems that would not have been possible
without recent advances in AI. Similar to how large language models learn
from vast databases of digital books, online writings and other media, its
researchers and scientists are working toward building virtual systems that
serve as digital representations of human physiology on all levels, such as
molecular, cellular or genome. As it is open source - free and publicly
available - scientists can then conduct virtual experiments on a scale not
possible in physical laboratories. "We will continue the model we've
pioneered of bringing together scientists and engineers in our own state-of-
the-art labs to build tools that advance the field," according to Thursday's
blog post. "We'll then use those tools to generate new data sets for training
new biological AI models to create virtual cells and immune systems and
engineer our cells to detect and treat disease.... "We have also established
the first large-scale GPU cluster for biological research, as well as the
largest datasets around human cell types. This collection of resources does
not exist anywhere else."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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