The OpenAI Foundation said Tuesday it is launching Data for Public Health — a grant push to build “high-quality scientific datasets” so medical AI has more real biology to learn from, MIT Technology Review reported.
In the first round, the foundation said it would give $40 million to a University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill program collecting data on novel cancer vaccines, and will also support OpenAdmet, which runs competitions where researchers try to predict drug effects. A separate $500,000 grant goes to 1Day Sooner to pursue analyst Ruxandra Teslo’s idea of buying “biotech’s lost archive” — regulatory filings and safety data from failed biotech companies that usually stay locked as trade secrets.
“Everyone is recognizing that data is the biggest bottleneck in successfully applying AI to biology,” former Altos Labs computation VP Morgan Levine told the outlet. The foundation said remaining breakthroughs in preventing and curing disease will come from pairing new models with more observations of the world — more data.
OpenAI’s nonprofit parent holds a large equity stake in the for-profit lab and has ramped grantmaking this year, including a prior $100 million gift for hepatitis C access. Foundation executive Jacob Trefethen said the charity operates separately from the product company and hopes to give away $1 billion by year-end.
Sources: MIT Technology Review
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