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- Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's charity has launched an initiative combining AI and biology.
- Biohub announced the initiative on Thursday, saying it will use AI to advance scientific research.
- It's the latest pivot for the charity, which originally launched to fix education and cure disease.
The philanthropy that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician, cofounded is shifting its focus.
That's good news for some, not such good news for others.
In a blog post on Thursday, the couple said they would now prioritize their philanthropic efforts on Biohub, a group of biology labs it has supported since 2016.
On the same day, Biohub said it would partner with EvolutionaryScale to leverage AI to "dramatically accelerate scientific progress toward understanding and addressing human disease."
"When we started, our goal was to help scientists cure or prevent all diseases this century," Zuckerberg said in a press release. "With advances in AI, we now believe this may be possible much sooner. Accelerating science is the most positive impact we think we can make. So we're going all in on AI-powered biology for our next chapter."
Zuckerberg and Chan have pledged to give away half their wealth, which could amount to well over $200 billion. When the couple first launched their foundation in 2015, they said it would focus on fixing education, public policy, as well as curing disease.
These days, like Meta itself, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has pivoted from those earlier goals to focus on AI.
In 2023, it laid off dozens of employees working in its education segment, ended its education policy grants portfolio, and shifted its focus away from an education tool it had previously developed. Last year, Chan said CZI would prioritize funding science.
"While CZI remains committed to our work in education and our local communities, we recognize that science is where our biggest investments and bets have been and will be made moving forward," Chan wrote in an email to staffers in 2024.
Under the latest initiative, Biohub said it's committing to four scientific challenges, including "using AI to reprogram and harness the immune system for early detection, prevention, and treatment of disease."
To achieve this, Biohub said it will expand its compute capacity to 10,000 GPUs by 2028.
"As we make progress on these kinds of systems, we believe it might eventually become possible to achieve decades of discoveries in months," Biohub said in a press release. "We believe this will come together to unlock frontier medicine."
