According to Business Insider, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are completely shifting their philanthropic focus from education to AI-powered biology. Their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which could eventually distribute over $200 billion, announced it’s going “all in” on Biohub labs that will leverage AI to accelerate disease research. The organization laid off dozens of education staff in 2023 and ended its education policy grants, marking a dramatic pivot from their original 2015 goals. Biohub now plans to expand to 10,000 GPUs by 2028 specifically for biological research. Zuckerberg stated they now believe curing all diseases this century “may be possible much sooner” thanks to AI advances. The initiative will focus on four scientific challenges including reprogramming the immune system using AI.
The Great Philanthropic Pivot
This isn’t just a small course correction—it’s a complete strategic overhaul. When they launched in 2015, education and public policy were front and center. Now? Basically, it’s all about AI-powered biology. They’ve been winding down education efforts for a while, but this announcement makes the shift official and permanent.
And honestly, it makes sense when you think about it. Meta itself has gone all-in on AI, so why wouldn’t their philanthropy follow suit? There’s a certain symmetry there. But here’s the thing: abandoning education entirely feels significant. Education was supposed to be one of their legacy areas, and now it’s clearly taking a backseat to what they see as the bigger opportunity.
Why AI in Biology Now?
The timing here is everything. We’re at this inflection point where AI models are suddenly capable of understanding biological complexity in ways we couldn’t imagine even five years ago. The partnership with EvolutionaryScale is particularly telling—they’re one of the companies pushing the boundaries of what AI can do with protein folding and molecular design.
Think about it: if you can use AI to model how diseases work at a molecular level, you’re potentially shortcutting years of trial and error. Biohub’s claim that they might achieve “decades of discoveries in months” isn’t just hype—we’re already seeing early examples of this acceleration in drug discovery and genetic research. The 10,000 GPU target by 2028 shows they’re serious about compute power too. That’s industrial-scale infrastructure they’re building.
What This Actually Means
So what does “reprogramming the immune system” actually look like in practice? We’re talking about using AI to design therapies that can detect diseases earlier, prevent them more effectively, and treat them more precisely. It’s about moving from reactive medicine to predictive and preventive medicine.
The scale of their ambition is breathtaking. Zuckerberg literally said they want to “cure or prevent all diseases this century.” That’s the kind of statement that would sound insane coming from most people. But when you’re talking about potentially $200 billion and the full force of modern AI? Suddenly it doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.
Part of a Bigger Pattern
This shift mirrors what we’re seeing across the tech philanthropy world. Other tech billionaires are similarly pivoting their charitable efforts toward what they see as high-impact, technology-driven solutions. It’s the Silicon Valley mindset applied to philanthropy: find the biggest leverage points and go big.
Whether this focus on high-tech solutions comes at the expense of more immediate, ground-level needs is an open question. But one thing’s clear: when Zuckerberg and Chan decide to go “all in” on something, they don’t do it halfway. The biological research world is about to get a massive injection of AI firepower, and the results could genuinely change medicine as we know it.
