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$500M for Virtual Biology Initiative, Funded by Zuckerbergs

https://biohub.org/news/virtual-biology-initiative/
22•warbaker•1h ago

Comments

burnto•1h ago
Is this an investment that disease and genetics researchers believe will be valuable?

Or is this primarily tax deductible funds flowing back into the AI industrial complex?

(Honest question! If it’s a truly promising path that’s great)

Tostino•56m ago
An attempt to live forever IMO.
Onavo•55m ago
They will probably do a rugpull like what they with their children school funding.
OutOfHere•15m ago
It's also what they did with meta.org (a trademark-grab followed by a rugpull): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_(academic_company)
d_silin•38m ago
It is a valuable initiative, regardless of Zuckerbergs personas.
jghn•26m ago
They already donate a lot of useful money via the Chan Zuckerberg Institute so there’s a good track record at least
randycupertino•8m ago
Chan Zuckerberg Institute doesn't produce much actual research it's mostly fancy dinners, global travel for congresses and conferences and big opulent parties. They actually got in trouble in the building with the landlord for too many parties, there was a problem drunken individuals peeing in the hallways when they had Justin Bieber and other celebs on site (seriously).
yalogin•22m ago
Genuine question, there are a lot of overly ambitious efforts like, even though this seems the most ambitious of them all - but is this all optimistic investment or is there any iota of indication that this is a viable path? I am very skeptical of the ai initiatives in medicine and biology where they want to solve problems that humans cannot yet. I would love to be wrong of course
randycupertino•12m ago
> there are a lot of overly ambitious efforts like, even though this seems the most ambitious of them all

Chan Zuckerberg is NOTORIOUS for overly ambitious claims, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative started in 2015 with the bold statement they would "cure all disease in our lifetime." It's been 11 years. Have they cured 1 disease? Let alone ~all~ disease? No.

When Zuckerberg realized he probably wasn't going to hit this goal they quietly changed it to "within our children's lifetimes."

I used to work in their building and actually saw them change it on the wall and as "within our childrens" 3 years in. Stay posted, probably in 15 years they buy themselves some more time and make it "our children's children's lifetimes."

d_silin•9m ago
Sort of long answer.

In, say, civil or aerospace engineering, science is understood well enough to allow your building or airplane to be modelled and tested using computer modelling, CAD software, FEM and CFD algorithms and so on. You can design a building or aircraft without ever building a single physical model, and it will stand (or fly), 99 times out of 100. It is oversimplification to a a degree, but sufficiently close approximation.

No such thing exists in biology, pharmaceutics, biotech and so on. The accuracy of computer models and simulation is not sufficient to produce results with single-digit percent accuracy for any metrics, hence long and complex Phase I-II-III trials. Maybe 1 out of 100 candidate drugs work.

Why? Because we do not have the same level of understanding for biological systems as we do for building or aircraft, or software. Amount of information is much larger, complexity is far greater, enzymes and cell signalling network make biochemistry even more non-linear. This makes the problem space vast. It is practically untapped domain and it can eat any amount of computation power and biologists, data scientists and software devs (manpower-wise).

Any incremental improvements in simulation, modelling and interpretation of biological system behaviour will generate downstream improvements in medicine, pharma, biotech. But general-purpose LLM AIs are not that useful in biology, you need more specialized solutions to improve both accuracy and performance of large number of algorithms that have tremendous computational complexity: computational chemistry, molecular dynamics, genomics->proteomics->interactomics->metabolomics (all of that for just intra-cellular behaviour - tissues, organism and organisms are multiple orders of magnitude harder).

How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt]

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-uncovered-the-nsas-big-brother-machine/
439•the-mitr•9h ago•136 comments

Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/i-can-never-talk-to-an-ai-anonymously
167•ilamont•1d ago•103 comments

CopyFail was not disclosed to distro developers?

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/04/30/10
377•ori_b•9h ago•304 comments

Can I disable all data collection from my vehicle?

https://rivian.com/support/article/can-i-disable-all-data-collection-from-my-vehicle
515•Cider9986•5h ago•194 comments

Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library

https://semgrep.dev/blog/2026/malicious-dependency-in-pytorch-lightning-used-for-ai-training/
331•j12y•10h ago•111 comments

The Internet Is Falling Down- CPanel/WHM Authentication Bypass CVE-2026-41940

https://labs.watchtowr.com/the-internet-is-falling-down-falling-down-falling-down-cpanel-whm-auth...
45•zikani_03•3h ago•15 comments

I built a Game Boy emulator in F#

https://nickkossolapov.github.io/fame-boy/building-a-game-boy-emulator-in-fsharp/
221•elvis70•9h ago•48 comments

Maladaptive Frugality

https://herbertlui.net/maladaptive-frugality/
20•herbertl•2d ago•3 comments

Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"

https://twitter.com/theo/status/2049645973350363168
970•elmean•11h ago•544 comments

The upsell game – Vercel upselling tactics revealed

https://theupsellgame.com/
104•bartoindahouse•6h ago•18 comments

How an oil refinery works

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332•chmaynard•12h ago•101 comments

New mechanical panoramic film camera from Jeff Bridges

https://wideluxx.com
83•armadsen•2d ago•33 comments

Reverse Engineering SimTower

https://phulin.me/blog/simtower
126•patrickhulin•2d ago•21 comments

Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

https://dpa-international.com/general-news/urn:newsml:dpa.com:20090101:260430-930-14717/
756•mpweiher•14h ago•709 comments

You can beat the binary search

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/04/27/you-can-beat-the-binary-search/
258•vok•3d ago•121 comments

Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected

https://sciencex.com/news/2026-04-snowball-earth-stranger-climate.html
37•wglb•4h ago•4 comments

Durable queues, streams, pub/sub, and a cron scheduler – inside your SQLite file

https://honker.dev/
178•ferriswil•11h ago•51 comments

Full-Text Search with DuckDB

https://peterdohertys.website/blog-posts/full-text-search-w-duckdb.html
93•ethagnawl•8h ago•23 comments

10Gb/s Ethernet: what I did to get it working in my home

https://www.gilesthomas.com/2026/04/10g-ethernet-what-i-did
150•gpjt•1d ago•107 comments

I aggregated 28 US Government auction sites into one search

https://bidprowl.com
245•scarsam•13h ago•73 comments

The Church Rock Uranium Mill Spill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill
63•Sir_Twist•2d ago•4 comments

Does Postgres Scale?

https://www.dbos.dev/blog/benchmarking-workflow-execution-scalability-on-postgres
86•KraftyOne•7h ago•40 comments

A Milestone in Formalization: The Sphere Packing Problem in Dimension 8

https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2604.23468
14•measurablefunc•2d ago•0 comments

Compositing and Blending – Exploring the math and intuition behind blend modes

https://nik.digital/posts/compositing-blending
17•OuterVale•1d ago•1 comments

The Accidental Ancestor – How Verifying Numbers Shaped Modern Hashing

https://0xkrt26.github.io/math_behind_security/2026/04/28/the-accidental-ancestor-Luhn-algorithm....
10•denismenace•2d ago•0 comments

SimpleX Channels, SimpleX Network Consortium and Community Crowdfunding

https://simplex.chat/blog/20260430-simplex-channels-v6-5-consortium-crowdfunding-freedom-of-speec...
19•pmw•5h ago•2 comments

Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga

https://www.democrata.es/en/politics/congress-and-senate/congress-will-act-against-massive-ip-blo...
418•akyuu•10h ago•174 comments

$500M for Virtual Biology Initiative, Funded by Zuckerbergs

https://biohub.org/news/virtual-biology-initiative/
22•warbaker•1h ago•10 comments

Follow-up to Carrot disclosure: Forgejo

https://dustri.org/b/follow-up-to-carrot-disclosure-forgejo.html
45•homebrewer•6h ago•7 comments

Recovering files from beyond the grave using PhotoRec

https://lost-number.bearblog.dev/recovering-files-from-beyond-the-grave-using-photorec/
54•speckx•8h ago•11 comments