Can Zuckerberg and his wife rely on artificial intelligence to eliminate human diseases?

On September 23, Beijing time, in 2016, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced an ambitious goal: to eliminate human diseases by 2100. This week, they detailed their plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) to get the job done.

This task will be implemented by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative), the charity organization of Zuckerberg and his wife. Their goal is to develop a computational system that researchers can use in conjunction with AI to classify cells and predict how they will behave in response to disease. Zuckerberg and his wife said in a statement that the data could be used to find new discoveries that could completely eliminate human diseases.

The "Chan Zuckerberg Initiative" said the company plans to build a computer system composed of more than 1,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) that can visually analyze healthy and diseased cells from a database. Later, the company hopes to make the system available to the public so that researchers can work together to use it to find new discoveries. However, AI companies are now vigorously purchasing H100, which has caused its supply to be very tight. Even large cloud service providers have difficulty purchasing H100 for their servers.

Zuckerberg said in a statement, "AI is creating new opportunities for biomedicine. Building a high-performance computing cluster dedicated to life science research will accelerate human progress on important scientific questions about how cells work." Priscilla Chen, a former pediatrician, said: "AI models can predict how immune cells respond to infections, what changes will happen at the cellular level when a child with a rare disease is born, and it can even predict how the patient's body will respond to new drugs."

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative said it plans to have the computing system ready for use in 2024, but declined to say how much money it would spend developing the product. Considering that the GPUs used by this system are in short supply, its development could be a huge expense.