A charitable foundation backed by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife on Monday said it had bought a Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) start-up as part of a mission to eradicate disease.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative did not disclose financial terms of the deal to acquire Toronto-based Meta, which uses AI to quickly read and comprehend scientific papers and then provide insights to researchers.
Meta capabilities are to be unified in a tool made available for free to scientists.
“We are very excited about what lies ahead,” Meta cofounder and chief executive Sam Molyneux said in a statement.
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a doctor, in September last year pledged US$3 billion over the next decade to help banish or manage all disease, pouring some of the Facebook founder’s fortune into innovative research.
“This is a big goal, but we spent the last few years speaking with experts who think it is possible, so we dug in,” Zuckerberg said at a San Francisco event announcing the effort.
In the field of biomedicine alone, thousands of research papers are published daily, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative science president Cori Bargmann and chief technology officer Brian Pinkerton said in a post on the charity’s Facebook page.
Meta AI can analyze insights across millions of papers, finding connections and patterns at scales and speeds impossible for humans to match unassisted, Bargmann and Pinkerton said.
“Meta will help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed or even predict where their field is headed,” they said. “The potential for this kind of platform is virtually limitless.”
Zuckerberg said last month that he had built an AI-imbued software “butler” — Jarvis — that even plays with his family.
The Facebook chief took on the personal project last year, devoting about 100 hours to making a system inspired by Iron Man film character Jarvis as a virtual assistant to help manage his household.
Jarvis is not a physical robot, but an application Zuckerberg can access through his smartphone or computer to control lights, temperature, music, security, appliances and more.
The software learns his tastes and patterns, as well as new words or concepts, and can even entertain his one-year-old daughter Max, Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg plans to continue improving Jarvis and says he expects AI technology to improve greatly in the coming five to 10 years.
AI is getting a foothold in people’s homes, starting with devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers that link to personal assistants to answer questions and control connected devices.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in