OpenAI Foundation Gives $125M to Public Data for AI-Driven Health Program

OpenAI’s restructuring last year created not only a new corporate structure for the company behind ChatGPT but also a potentially enormous new philanthropic force: the OpenAI Foundation. Now the Foundation is putting $125 million behind a bet on what increasingly powerful artificial intelligence will need to accelerate medical discovery: better data.

The new initiative, Public Data for Health, will fund nonprofits and universities building, preserving, and opening high-quality scientific datasets for researchers. Initial grantees include OpenADMET, CTD Commons, and the University of North Carolina, with projects spanning drug discovery, regulatory knowledge, and personalized cancer vaccines.

“The importance of data is only going to go up as AI progresses and as intelligence becomes more abundant and more used within the life sciences and within academia,” Jacob Trefethen, head of Life Sciences & Curing Diseases at the OpenAI Foundation, told Inside Precision Medicine.

The premise is straightforward: increasingly capable AI models may be able to find patterns across enormous quantities of biological information, but what they can discover ultimately depends on the observations available to them. “One of the great complements to AI progress is actually more observations of the world,” Trefethen said. “Data is, in that sense, the foundational input to discovery.”