Honolulu Star Bulletin - Zuckerbergs put AI at heart of pledge to cure diseases

The philanthropic mission created in 2016 by the Meta co-founder and his spouse, Priscilla Chan, said that its scientific teams will now be centralized in an organization dubbed 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 was for the creation of a Biohub in San Francisco 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.

Y.Kapu--HStB