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 Zuckerberg’s foundation bought an AI biology lab called EvolutionaryScale, it declined to disclose the financial terms, according to Axios, the kind of move that helps keep things in the intangible realm.
They’ve made curing or preventing all diseases by the end of this century their philanthropic brand.
Unless you dig deep into the nitty gritty details of Biohub, the flavor is of an effort aimed at creating AI models so good, they simply spit out solutions to diseases.
Gizmodo reached out to Biohub for comment, and we will update this article if we hear back.
A version of this murky, AI-as-magic-wand framing has been used by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has posted on X that “AI will help discover new science, such as cures for diseases.” It’s a bit less magical than the Zuckerberg-Chan version, but it still conjures vague, AI-based discoveries that show up like bolts from the blue.
AI will help discover new science, such as cures for diseases, which is perhaps the most important way to increase quality of life long-term.
AI will also present new threats to society that we have to address. No company can sufficiently mitigate these on their own; we will…
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 24, 2026
So I don’t mean to make it sound like The OpenAI Foundation’s “AI for Alzheimer’s” page is free of self-aggrandizing AI hypespeak. The concepts being used to organize the foundations efforts are as follows:
- “Create a ‘causal map’ of Alzheimer’s using AI, to validate targets for intervention.”
- “Design new drugs with the help of AI, and test them in the lab”
- “Support open datasets to predict drug activity, and chart the progression of disease with and without intervention.”
- “Establish new biomarkers for disease, improving diagnosis and how clinical trials are run”
- “Test off-patent treatments and use AI to make the best sense of anonymised patient data and experiences reported online.”
Four of those five concepts mention AI or invoke it indirectly. But if the foundation simply must brand its philanthropic efforts vis-a-vis research with AI-related language, these are somewhat helpful formulations, assuming one wants to give these efforts the benefit of the doubt. After all, if AI-based tools can be proven effective in any of the areas on the OpenAI Foundation’s list, such as “improving diagnosis and how clinical trials are run” that’s terrific, but the clinical trials themselves are front and center in its publicity materials, as is helping to pay for them to happen.
The OpenAI Foundation seems to have some sense that verbiage is important here. A blog post last month about its “mission,” says its former “Health & Curing Diseases” section will now be called “Life Sciences & Curing Diseases.” The new emphasis on the term “life science” is intended to “reflect the Foundation’s focus on advancing biology and medical research as core to curing disease.”
I’m biased. I’ve had enough relatives die of Alzheimer’s disease that I’m not particularly choosy about how a cure or preventative treatment gets into human bodies. One day, perhaps I’ll take a pill containing a molecule an AI model pinpointed, which then got sped toward trials because another AI model said it targeted a promising mechanism in the body for preventing Alzheimer’s.
But even if that happened, today’s AI philanthropy still would not deserve as much credit as the actual human scientists who performed actual lab experiments.
