Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan want to advance medical research by building a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system. Their goal is to understand human cells and diseases, paving the way for potentially revolutionary discoveries.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), led by husband and wife Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan since its creation in 2015, unveiled on September 19 a bold philanthropic project that could transform research in life sciences.
The initiative plans to build a computer system equipped with cutting-edge AI to study human diseases and cells. The ultimate goal is to accelerate medical discoveries that could help cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century. This is part of the current desire to use AI to develop medicine.
A system powered by 1,000 GPUs
The use of artificial intelligence in life sciences is not new, but CZI plans to take this technology to a much higher level. Platforms like Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold and NVIDIA’s RadImageGAN have already shown how AI can predict protein structures and detect various medical conditions.
The philanthropic project aims to create a computer system that will be accessible to all researchers, using data sets from various sources.
The high-performance computing cluster, expected to include more than 1,000 GPUs (graphics processing units), will be one of the world’s most powerful computing systems dedicated to nonprofit life sciences research. It will be powered by data from the CZ Cell x Gene tool, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network (a group of research institutes), and other resources, including publicly available data.
Promising possibilities to be credited to AI
The main goal is to use AI to create predictive models of healthy and diseased cells. This advance could revolutionize the understanding of cellular systems, allowing researchers to predict how a cell would react to an infection, but also to better understand rare diseases in children, or even to predict how a patient’s body would react to an infection. new medicine.
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and co-CEO of CZI, says this initiative will provide a better understanding of our cells and their behavior in health and disease. Generative AI will be at the heart of this advancement, paving the way for new insights into the fundamental characteristics of cells.
This announcement comes as Meta works to deploy large language models for businesses. The company recently launched its Llama 2 model and is offering access to its models to select businesses for free. This approach is in any case part of the Californian giant’s vision of maximizing the creation of new tools, while reducing infrastructure costs thanks to crowdsourcing.
Source : CZI
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