14 DAY TRIAL // Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscila Chan, the two people behind the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, have acquired Meta Search, an AI-powered research search engine startup.
The $45 billion philanthropy organization is at its first acquisition which they hope will make it easier for scientists to search, read and put together tens of millions of science research papers. Not only are they putting the money forward for buying this tool but they’re also going to make it free for everyone to use in a few months’ time.
What can Meta do?
Meta is the type of tool that could be of help to scientists looking for the latest papers related to their own projects. Organizations could also end up finding themselves collaborating with researchers and identifying the best areas for investment.
Meta is a rather cool search engine because its AI can recognize authors, citations and more between papers. Thanks to these features, it can bring out the best researches one needs, and not just those that feature the same terms. The fact that it has free access to 18,000 journals and literature sources should indicate just how much of a treasure it is for the scientific community.
Co-founder Sam Molyneux explains that, in science, peer-reviewed articles are the medium for global conversation among researchers, representing the foundational reference point by which they judge what is known. “But in the 21st century, the speed of science staggers under its own growth. Each day, more than 4,000 scientific papers are published in biomedicine alone. Using current tools, most will not be read by other scientists who can learn from them,” he adds. Meta changes this.
Molyneux says that as part of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Meta’s capabilities will be united into a single, powerful tool that everyone will be free to use, providing a modern way for researchers to understand the state of scientific knowledge and what’s happening, right now.
Long play
Discussions regarding the acquisition have been going on since last year. The point of it all is not to profit from Meta’s data and capabilities, but for them to benefit the world.
Financial terms of the acquisition have not been mentioned, but the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative sure has more than enough funds for this. The purchase, however, falls in line with the other move the foundation has made - pledging 3 billion towards curing all known diseases.