The OpenAI Foundation’s New Alzheimer’s Effort Helps Demystify ‘AI Will Cure All Diseases’

AI will not cure all diseases. But a new collection of grants from the OpenAI Foundation, collectively written about under the title “AI for Alzheimer’s” in a blog post published on Wednesday seems like a powerful and potentially huge gesture. In no small part, that’s because OpenAI is clearly attaching a dollar figure to its effort, and reminding us that it’s funding humans doing jobs. OpenAI claims to be finalizing, “more than $100 million in grants this month, across six research institutions, to support and accelerate Alzheimer’s research.” That’s a large, targeted money commitment, and the rest of the blog post is a reminder of what leads to medical breakthroughs: human scientists and clinicians, along with patients, all grinding for years to find answers. And yes, it might help that AI shows genuine promise in applications like drug discovery. By comparison, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Pricilla Chan’s Biohub effort is more mystifying, even though it’s similar in principle—an effort to direct the couple’s philanthropy toward AI-related medical research. It has a homepage that says “Our mission is to cure or prevent all disease” right at the top. When Chan and Zuckerb