AI models need more data about biology, and OpenAI is paying

The OpenAI Foundation is funding a new effort called Data for Public Health.

Last year Ruxandra Teslo, a policy analyst who focuses on clinical trials, posted an idea for supercharging medical AI systems: Use data from failed biotech companies.

By bidding at their bankruptcy proceedings, she proposed, it might be possible to obtain detailed regulatory filings, manufacturing strategies, and safety data—types of information usually considered trade secrets. She called these documents “ biotech’s lost archive ” and said they could be used to help train AIs that would act as powerful copilots in the often opaque drug approval process.

Today the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit parent of OpenAI , said it would fund her idea as part of a new effort it calls Public Data for Health, which aims to help artificial intelligence make big leaps in medicine by paying to create “high-quality scientific datasets.”

The basic idea is that AI isn’t going to be capable of making important breakthroughs in curing disease unless researchers can feed the models much more information than they have so far.

“Everyone is recognizing that data is the biggest bottleneck in successfully applying AI to biology,” says Morgan Levine, a former vice president for computation at Altos Labs, a longevity company.

In its initial round of data grants, the OpenAI Foundation also announced that it would give $40 million to a program to collect data about novel cancer vaccines at the University of North Carolina

, Chapel Hill, and support OpenAdmet, a group that runs competitions in which researchers try to predict drug effects.

Teslo’s idea for a biotech archive received $500,000 and will be pursued by 1Day Sooner, an advocacy group representing clinical trial volunteers, which she advises.

“We expect many remaining breakthroughs in preventing and curing disease to come from pairing the intelligence of new models with more observations of the world—in other words, more data,” the OpenAI Foundation said in a statement.

OpenAI started as a nonprofit, but leader Sam Altman restructured it to form a for-profit corporation that develops new models, launches products, and is now planning an initial public offering of stock that could value it at $1 trillion .

Because the foundation holds a 26% equity stake in OpenAI, it is now be on track to become the richest charitable organization on the plan