The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Mark Zuckerberg's philanthropy organisation, plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) for life sciences research. Their computing system will harness the power of available generative AI models to study human cells and accelerate efforts to cure, prevent, and manage diseases.
The philanthropy created by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, aims to build new technologies to speed up progress in science and education, focusing on disease eradication and education improvements.

The initiative has developed a software tool called CZ CELLxGENE, which helps scientists expand their knowledge about health and disease. It also invests in innovative companies that develop unique solutions to specific issues relevant to their mission.AI models have already been used in life sciences, with, for example, Google DeepMind's AlphaFold predicting protein structures and Nvidia's RadImageGAN AI radiology tool diagnosing medical conditions.

Why does it matter?

This move comes as Meta is rolling out large language models (LLMs) for businesses, indicating a growing trend of generative AI applications in various industries. After Llama in February, the company released its new Llama 2 model in July and offered it for free to certain companies.
This also comes as Meta and ChatGPT maker OpenAI face a lawsuit for copyright infringement. The case filed by comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors claims that the tech companies violated their intellectual property rights by training their LLMs with their books. Yesterday, Meta asked the court to dismiss the case, adding that it made 'quintessential fair use' of the works to train its AI models.