Zuckerberg's $500M AI biology swing

Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Google Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis has predicted that AI could eventually end disease, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's Biohub just put $500M on the same bet.

Their new five-year Virtual Biology Initiative pairs major funding and a powerhouse of partners, all coordinated around the same goal: producing enough data to push AI to model how disease starts at the cell level.

Reminder: Our next live workshop is today at 2 PM EST! Join for a walkthrough of OpenAI’s Codex platform, its new features, and how to best leverage it as a non-technical user. RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Zuckerberg’s Biohub funnels $500M into AI biology

• Mayo Clinic AI spots pancreatic cancer 3 years early

• Build a custom blog writing agent with no code

• Food AI’s ‘ChatGPT moment’ — tastes like a chef

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BIOHUB

🧬 Zuckerberg’s Biohub funnels $500M into AI biology

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown

The Rundown: Biohub, the nonprofit backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s CZI, announced a $500M Virtual Biology Initiative to build open datasets and models that can predict how human cells behave — pushing AI toward biology simulation.

The details:

• $400M of the $500M will fund data generation and imaging tech, with $100M for external research labs and research efforts.

• Nvidia, Allen Institute, Arc, and others are joining the initiative, with Biohub committing to open datasets as a shared base for AI biology research.

• Current AI biology datasets max out near 1B cells, with Biohub’s Alex Rives saying an “order of magnitude” more data is needed to accelerate the efforts.

• The goal is to train models on the data to use AI toward “understanding disease and reprogramming it at the level of cells, molecules, and tissues.”

Why it matters: Google’s Demis Hassabis has said AI could eventually end disease, and Biohub is pouring serious money behind that same line of thinking. The question is whether the scaling that cracked language and protein structure also holds for cells, and whether $500M gets anywhere close to the data scale needed to find out.

TOGETHER WITH GLEAN

📈 From agent sprawl to real ROI

The Rundown: Organizations are deploying agents across functions, but few are seeing the ROI they expected. Join Glean:LIVE on May 12 to discover the Enterprise Agent Development Lifecycle — a new operating model that moves enterprises from scattered experiments to agents that deliver real, measurable impact.

Register for Glean:LIVE to:

• Get a repeatable framework for building, launching, and governing agents at scale

• Hear from enterprise leaders on the decisions shaping their agent strategy

• Watch product demos spanning the full agent lifecycle — with a live Q&A at the end

Register now.

AI & HEALTHCARE

🔬 Mayo Clinic AI spots pancreatic cancer 3 years early

Image source: Mayo Clinic

The Rundown: Mayo Clinic published new data on REDMOD, an AI that reads invisible tissue patterns on standard CT scans, catching pancreatic cancer up to three years ahead of when doctors typically find it and nearly doubling specialist accuracy.

The details:

• REDMOD reviewed nearly 2,000 routine CT scans that specialists had originally read as normal before later diagnoses, picking up 73% of the cases early.

• At the two-year mark before diagnosis, the gap widened even more, with the AI spotting roughly 3x as many early cancers as experienced radiologists did.

• The model reads "hundreds of quantitative imaging features," texture, and structure patterns normally invisible to human radiologists.

Why it matters: Pancreatic cancer’s 5-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is below 15%, making early diagnosis and treatment critical. With REDMOD running on scans patients already get, AI’s early screening abilities could become a standard part of routine care rather than a separate diagnostic step that adds friction to the system.

AI TRAINING

✍️ Build a custom blog writing agent with no code

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to build a subagent in Langflow that writes blog posts in your website's style. The big win is that the agent runs locally for free (besides LLM calls) and can be triggered by Claude, Codex, etc.

Step-by-step:

1. Download Langflow, open it on your computer (it runs locally), click New Flow, go to the content generation section, and choose the Blog Writer template

2. Add a text input called "topic", giving the agent a topic to write about, and link your best blog in the reference input so the agent can copy your writing style

3. Add your OpenAI or Anthropic API key under the language model settings. Then select the model you want the flow to use

4. Click on Playground and test it with a topic. That runs the flow, pulls in your reference style, and gives you a first draft

Pro tip: If you want Claude to use this as a subagent, click Share > MCP Server > Claude MCP. Then Claude can call that blog-writing tool for you whenever you need it.

PRESENTED BY BOX

🧠 Turn enterprise knowledge into AI action

The Rundown: Enterprise AI only works when it has the right business content. Box is the secure, essential context layer for agents to access the institutional knowledge that makes a company run.

Box's AI suite includes:

• Box Extract to pull actionable data from enterprise content at scale

• Box Agent to transform unstructured data into the context AI needs

• Box Automate (now GA) to orchestrate agentic workflow automation

Learn more about Box’s AI solutions at Box’s Content + AI Virtual Summit on May 20.

AI RESEARCH

🧑‍🍳 Food AI’s ‘ChatGPT moment’ — tastes like a chef

Image source: Midjourney

The Rundown: Food robotics startup KAIKAKU AI just published Epicure, a new paper claiming a "ChatGPT moment" for food AI that shows its AI model can pick up on flavor, cuisine, and texture just from how chefs combine ingredients in recipes.

The details:

• Researchers cleaned 6,653 messy ingredient entries into 1,032 usable foods, then mapped with AI how they relate across recipes.

• Despite never seeing chemistry data or taste labels, the model identified all 5 basic tastes, ordered peppers by spiciness, and tagged cuisines by region.

• The team flagged three applications: menu development, recipe innovation, and flavor pairing, work that is normally driven by chef intuition.

• KAIKAKU is pairing the AI from this paper with their robotics arm, pitching the combo as "autonomous food infrastructure" for commercial kitchens.

Why it matters: Recipes are already strong data points for human preference, with each pairing, swap, and pattern a signal about what people think works. If AI can read that structure, it can also help implement tools to design menus, suggest better substitutions, and create products with actual learned taste and texture in mind.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎶 ElevenMusic – Platform for AI song generation, remixing, creator payouts

• 🚀 MiMo-V2.5-Pro – Xiaomi's powerful new open-source model

• 🧠 GPT 5.5 – OpenAI's frontier model for agentic coding and computer use

• ⚙️ Cursor SDK – Run Cursor’s coding agents in other workflows and products

📰 Everything else in AI today

ElevenLabs launched ElevenMusic, a streaming platform with built-in AI remixing and AI-assisted track creation, already hosting 4k+ artists and offering creator payouts.

Two U.S. House committees opened probes into Cursor-maker Anysphere and Airbnb over Chinese AI use, with Composer 2 built on Kimi and Airbnb's agent on Qwen.

Mistral AI launched Vibe remote agents, cloud sessions that run coding tasks in parallel, powered by the company’s new open-weights Medium 3.5 model.

Google added file creation into Gemini, allowing the model to output formats like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, Microsoft Word and Excel files, Markdown, and more.

OpenAI released a Cybersecurity Action Plan to "democratize" AI cyber defense and work with the U.S. government and industry on threat coordination and defender tools.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Patrick B. in Boonsboro, MD:

"A couple of months ago, I received a cancer diagnosis… The amount of appointments, trying to understand the medical concepts, my diagnosis, appointments, scans, and how cancer really operates, is really overwhelming.
I built out several assets and artifacts in Claude, including a dashboard to help me manage my diagnosis with appointments, insurance claims, scans, treatment, regimens, etc. This allowed me to also share with my family the progress and what was happening with my diagnosis. As far as being a patient advocate, this really made it a lot easier for me to ask better, more targeted questions to my oncology team and helped me manage this whole process a lot better than I could have otherwise.
This has been a huge advantage for me in keeping on top of my diagnosis and making sure that I follow the doctor's instructions in a more detailed way. It also gives me a central place to ask questions about my diagnosis since it knows me like my doctors."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: The biggest AI trial ever kicks off

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Samsung’s Meta Ray-Ban rival just leaked

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: The Chinese robot ban is coming

• Today’s AI tool guide: Build a custom blog writing agent with no code

• RSVP to workshop today @ 2PM EST: Codex for non-technical operators

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown