Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Buys Meta To Help Organize Scientific Data

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the independent company founded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan, has inked its first purchase of another company.

In a Facebook posting by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Cori Bargmann, president of science, and Brian Pinkerton, chief technology officer, it was announced that it is acquiring Meta, a company that has developed artificial intelligence that can helps scientists read, understand and prioritize millions of scientific papers.

“Believe it or not, that’s not so easy today. In the field of biomedicine alone, researchers publish more than 4,000 scientific papers every day. But many of these papers will not be read by the scientists who could learn the most from them. Scientists know that existing search tools can’t capture all of the relevant knowledge in this immense volume of scientific research. Meta is a tool that helps fill that gap,” the two wrote in the posting. “Meta uses artificial intelligence to analyze and connect insights across millions of papers. It seeks out the most relevant or impactful studies in a scientific area the moment they are published and finds patterns in the literature on a scale that no human being could accomplish alone.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative plans to work to make Meta more powerful and useful for scientists and will offer the tools and features free to every researcher. The two executives noted Meta’s tools can “dramatically accelerate scientific progress and move us closer to our goal: to support science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Meta has raised more than $7 million in funding.