The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a nonprofit launched by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife aimed at curing all disease, on Thursday announced it was restructuring to focus on using artificial intelligence to achieve that goal.

The move narrows the focus of the philanthropic organization founded in 2015 with a vow to devote most of the couple’s significant wealth to charitable causes, including social justice and voter rights.

Zuckerberg is among the high-profile tech figures who has backed away from diversity, equality and fact-checking initiatives after US President Donald Trump took office in January.

The organization this year ended its diversity efforts, curbed support of nonprofits that provide housing and stopped funding a primary school that gave education and health care to underserved children, according to media reports.

The philanthropic mission created by the Meta co-founder and his spouse, Priscilla Chan, said that its current priority involves scientific teams centralized in a facility called Biohub.

“This is a pivotal moment in science, and the future of AI-powered scientific discovery is starting to come into view,” Biohub said in a blog post.

“We believe that it will be possible in the next few years to create powerful AI systems that can reason about and represent biology to accelerate science.”

Biohub envisions AI helping advance ways to detect, prevent and cure diseases, according to the post.

The mission includes trying to model the human immune system, potentially opening a door to “engineering human health.”

“We believe we’re on the cusp of a scientific revolution in biology—as frontier artificial intelligence and virtual biology give scientists new tools to understand life at a fundamental level,” Biohub said in the post.

The first investment announced by the Zuckerbergs when the initiative debuted nearly a decade ago was for the creation of a Biohub in Silicon Valley where researchers, scientists and others could work to build tools to better study and understand diseases.

Shortly after it was established, the initiative bought a Canadian startup which uses AI to quickly read and comprehend scientific papers and then provide insights to researchers.

“Our multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers have built incredible technologies to observe, measure and program biology,” Biohub said of its progress.

Meta is among the big tech firms that have been pouring billions of dollars into data centers and more in a race to lead the field of AI.

© 2025 AFP

Surfshark is one of our favorite VPNs to get around geographical restrictions on content (aka access Netflix) and protect your web traffic while using an open Wi-Fi hotspot. Surfshark is secure, and it provides great value for the money if you pay for two years upfront. We also like that Surfshark’s plans are simple: A single Surfshark subscription works simultaneously on multiple devices and protects your entire household. No multiple accounts, no confusion. Get award-winning security that’s even more budget-friendly with our roundup of top Surfshark coupons, plans from $3 per month, and 3 free months on 1 or 2 year subscriptions.

Black Friday Surfshark Offers 2025

Ahead of the holiday season, Surfshark has already released its Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, with discounts on its 24-, 12-, and one-month plans, including Starter, One, and One+ plans. The Starter plan includes a 30-day money-back guarantee and gets you a secure, fast VPN and email masking; plus, with this discount you get three extra months for free. The One plan also includes antivirus protection, dark web monitoring, and private search results; plus the three free months and a money-back guarantee. The top tier One+ plan includes all of that plus data removal by Incogni, three free months, and a money-back guarantee, starting at only $4 per month.

Save on 1 and 2 Year Plans With Surfshark Coupons

Right now, you can get a 7 day free trial, an extra 3 months for free on all 1-year and 2-year plans, and up to 87% off with active Surfshark coupon codes. The Surfshark Starter Plan is still the cheapest plan—now it starts at $2 per month on a 2-year plan compared to $20 per month if you were paying month to month. The most comprehensive plan is Surfshark One+, which is now 81% off, at $4 per month. Even the basic Surfshark Starter plan includes unlimited devices, ad and cookie pop-up blockers, double encryption, and alternative IDs.

Surfshark also offers Surfshark One Plus for $6 per month, with 3 months extra. Surfshark One adds some extra features like Real-time credit card and ID breach alerts, personal data security reports, and anti-virus and anti-malware software. One Plus gets you all that and adds data removal services. You can see the full breakdown of services and a comparison of the plans on the Surfshark website.

In my testing over the years, Surfshark has consistently had some of the best speeds of any VPN I’ve used. I have never had any problem streaming HD content through Surfshark. It’s fast enough that you won’t notice any speed degradation.

Score a 7-Day Free Trial on Surfshark and 30 Day Guarantee

If you’re feeling commitment-shy, fear not, there is a 7-day free trial on all plans, plus a 30-day refund period and if it turns out Surfshark isn’t right for you. Just contact Surfshark and you’ll receive a full refund within 30 days with their money-back guarantee. With your Surfshark free trial, you can do things like change your IP with 3,200+ encrypted servers, encrypt your connection to stop data tracking, and more.

Students Can Get a 15% Off Surfshark Discount Code

Students can get an even better deal on Surfshark, adding an additional 15% discount on VPN and Antivirus plans on top of the coupons above. To receive your discount code, first verify your student status through StudentBeans on Surfshark’s website. Graduate students can get the graduate discount of 15% off the already great price of $1.99 per month.

Get Paid $38 Or 3 Months Of SurfShark Free When You Refer A Friend

When you invite friends to use Surfshark, you can score cash rewards. With the refer a friend program, you can now choose between getting up to 3 free months of Surfshark, or paying the equivalent amount via PayPal (up to $38). If your invited friend purchases 1 month of Surfshark, you’ll both get 1 month free. If your invited friend purchases a longer Surfshark plan, you’ll both get 3 months free. To redeem, you’ll need to share the unique referral link that’ll be in your Surfshark app with as many friends as you want. When each friend signs up and keeps their account active for 31 days, you’ll be able to choose whether you want money in your account or free months added to your Surfshark subscription.

When users ask ChatGPT to generate an image in a Ghibli style, the actual image is created by DALL-E, a tool powered by diffusion models. Although these models produce stunning images—such as transforming photos into artistic styles, creating personalized characters, or rendering realistic landscapes—they also face certain limitations. These include occasional errors, like three-fingered hands or distorted faces, and challenges in running on devices with limited computational resources, like smartphones, due to their massive number of parameters.

A research team, jointly led by Professors Jaejun Yoo and Sung Whan Yoon of the UNIST Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence at UNIST, has proposed a new design principle for generative AI that addresses these issues. They have shown, through both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments, that training diffusion models to reach “flat minima”—a specific type of optimal point on the loss surface—can simultaneously improve both the robustness and the generalization ability of these models.

Their study was presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025), and the findings are posted on the arXiv preprint server.

Diffusion models are widely used in popular AI applications, including tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, enabling a range of tasks from style transfer and cartoon creation to realistic scene rendering. However, deploying these models often leads to challenges, such as error accumulation during short generation cycles, performance degradation after model compression techniques like quantization, and vulnerability to adversarial attacks—small, malicious input perturbations designed to deceive the models.

The research team identified that these issues stem from fundamental limitations in the models’ ability to generalize—meaning their capacity to perform reliably on new, unseen data or in unfamiliar environments.

To address this, the research team proposed guiding the training process toward “flat minima”—regions in the model’s loss landscape characterized by broad, gentle surfaces. Such minima help the model maintain stable and reliable performance despite small disturbances or noise. Conversely, “sharp minima”—narrow, steep valleys—tend to cause performance to deteriorate when faced with variations or attacks.

Among various algorithms designed to find flat minima, the team identified Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) as the most effective. Models trained with SAM demonstrated reduced error accumulation during rapid generation tasks, maintained higher quality outputs after compression, and exhibited a sevenfold increase in resistance to adversarial attacks, significantly boosting their robustness.

While previous research addressed issues like error accumulation, quantization errors, and adversarial vulnerabilities separately, this study shows that focusing on flat minima offers a unified and fundamental solution to all these challenges.

The researchers highlight that their findings go beyond simply improving image quality. They provide a fundamental framework for designing trustworthy, versatile generative AI systems that can be effectively applied across various industries and real-world scenarios. Additionally, this approach could pave the way for training large-scale models like ChatGPT more efficiently, even with limited data.