CZI to Boost Scientific Research with AI-powered Meta

Editor’s Note: We are sunsetting the Meta application on March 31, 2022. Please see our Medium post for more information.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has agreed to acquire Meta, a company that has developed an AI that helps scientists read, understand and prioritize millions of scientific papers.

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.

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.

Meta’s tools can dramatically accelerate scientific progress and move us closer to our goal of supporting science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of the century. Meta will help scientists learn from others’ discoveries in real time, find key papers that may have gone unnoticed, or even predict where their field is headed.

CZI will be working to make Meta even more powerful and useful for the entire scientific community, and is committed to offering the tools and features for free to all researchers.

The potential for this kind of platform is virtually limitless: a researcher could use Meta to help identify emerging techniques for understanding coronary artery disease; a graduate student could see that two different diseases activate the same immune defense pathway; and clinicians could find scientists working on the most promising Zika treatments sooner. In the long run, it could be extended to other areas of knowledge: for example, it could help educators stay up to date on developmental science to better understand how children learn.

We will work with Sam Molyneux, his sister and co-founder, Amy Molyneux, and the entire Meta team to support and improve this new tool. To reserve a spot in line for an invite to get started with Meta, you can reserve a free account at meta.org.

By Jeff MacGregor, Director of Communications, Science