Facebook mogul's AI bid to wipe out ALL diseases

BILLIONAIRE couple Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are now piling their cash into AI tech in a staggering bid to help prevent and cure ALL diseases.

- BY BARBARA ORTUTAY

For the past decade, the uber-wealthy pair have funded underprivileged schools, immigration reform and efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion.

But now it seems they've shifted the bulk of their philanthropic resources to Biohub, the pair's science organisation, to focus on using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery.

The idea is to develop AI-based cell models to understand how they work in the human body, study inflammation and use AI to "harness the immune system" for disease detection, prevention and treatment.

"I feel like the science work that we've done, the Biohub model in particular, has been the most impactful thing that we have done. So we want to really double down on that," Zuckerberg said on Wednesday at an event at the Biohub Imaging Institute in Redwood City, California, US.

"Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward." Three other Biohub institutes — in New York, San Francisco and Chicago, focus on addressing different scientific challenges.

Chan and Zuckerberg have pledged 99% of their lifetime wealth, from shares of Meta Platforms, where Zuckerberg is CEO, for the lofty goal - "to cure, prevent or manage all disease".