Exclusive: Zuckerberg-backed Biohub bets $500M on AI biology
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Biohub, the nonprofit spearheaded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, is committing $500 million to help create better AI simulations of the human body, officials shared first with Axios.
Why it matters: The bet is that more data and compute will produce more useful models.
The big picture: Zuckerberg said last year that Biohub's long-term goal is to cure all human disease through the intersection of AI and biology.
- The effort goes beyond frontier AI companies' focus on drug discovery.
What they're saying: "I think there is a path to building accurate predictive models of the cell," Biohub chief Alex Rives told Axios.
- The key is having more data, Rives said. The usefulness of an AI model's prediction increases exponentially as the scale of the data grows.
- Most current datasets cover about a billion cells, Rives said. "We hope to get an order of magnitude or more beyond that."
Zoom in: Of the $500 million over five years, Biohub will spend $400 million on its own work and $100 million to spur others.
- Partners include chipmaker Nvidia, leading research organizations such as the Allen Institute as well as the Human Cell Atlas and the Human Protein Atlas.
Yes, but: Reaching the ambitious goal of curing all disease is likely to take more than five years or the $500 million that Biohub is providing. Rives said that he hopes other funders will expand on the $100 million that Biohub is making available to other entities.
- "The advances that we've had in protein biology came through decades of investment," Rives said.
What we're watching: The big unknown is how much data it will take to make cellular models accurate enough to produce useful predictions.
- "We don't yet know what the slope of the scaling law is with cellular biology," Rives said.
