Ten years ago, we started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to help cure diseases, improve education, support our local community, and more. We’re proud of all this work, and especially what we believe has been our greatest impact: accelerating science and developing the Biohub network.
When we started, our goal was to help scientists cure or prevent all diseases this century. 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.
Going forward, Biohub will be our primary philanthropic effort and where we’ll dedicate the vast majority of our resources.
We plan to build Biohub into the first research organization that combines frontier AI with frontier biology. 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. 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.
To accelerate this work, we have recruited a team of top AI researchers who have built leading protein language models, and they will partner with the leading scientists who run our Biohubs in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. 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.
We will continue our other philanthropic efforts as well, but the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will serve as infrastructure and support for our initiatives.
We are very excited about the decade ahead. There will be many challenges, but we believe that achieving some of humanity’s long-term dreams will also come within reach.
Mark and Priscilla