Chan Zuckerberg Initiative buys AI science research tool Meta
Charitable foundation the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, has acquired Toronto-based scientific search engine Meta in the initiative's first company purchase. Meta is an artificial intelligence tool that analyses current and historical scientific papers, seeking to draw patterns and offer insights more quickly than a human researcher. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative aims to open up the tool for free use once the deal has been approved, with integration into third-party platforms the first priority. Meta is already used by 1,200 institutes around the world.
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CEO of the Toronto-based company, Sam Molyneux, explains in a blogpost how he and his sister Amy, along with a team of engineers and scientists, spent six years working out “how to use artificial intelligence to analyse new scientific knowledge as it’s published - along with the majority of what has been written, throughout modern history.”

Meta’s AI analyses millions of papers, seeking out patterns and drawing insights faster than a human researcher. It helps scientists make connections in the data, find collaborators working on similar material, and helps funding bodies find investment opportunities. It was created to help scientists find relevant information faster - ranking and prioritising the data it has scoured and sourced, working like an expert Google but with a human-like eye for detail and importance - but also to make the rapidly increasing number of scientific papers published each year manageable and useful. According to Molyneux, every day more than 4,000 papers on biomedicine alone are published.

“Using current tools, most will not be read by other scientists who can learn from them. Scientists lack the means to make sense of the vast amount of research being produced around the world. To speed up progress, researchers need to be able to learn from each other's insights in real time.” Meta is already used by 1,200 institutes globally, says Molyneux, and he believes the AI will be able to make its own scientific discoveries as time progresses.

“In partnership with SRI International (the creators of Siri), we commercialised an AI technology that can read millions of papers to uncover emerging discoveries years ahead of time. We created neural network systems that look at hundreds of signals within new papers, as they are published, to project their future impact with striking accuracy.”

Under the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Meta will become a “single, powerful tool that is available to everyone”.

The first step, post-acquisition, will be for Meta to open up to developers so it can be integrated on other platforms, prioritising the sectors and people “who need them most”.

“We will be working to make Meta even more powerful and useful for the entire scientific community, and are committed to offering these tools and features for free to all researchers,” Cori Bargmann, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s president of science, and CTO Brian Pinkerton said in a Facebook post.