Mark Zuckerberg: commitment

Transcript context

…Okay, yeah. How will the next four years be different to the first four? Well, so one of the things that we struggle with here that these are such a long-term projects. So we talked a lot about the scientific research. We’re also doing a bunch of work with education to build tools for teachers to do more project-based learning, more personalized learning for kids. But basically make it so that teachers have tools to do the work that they want to do, like mentoring students and not just having to lecture and have everyone learn at the same pace. We’re making progress in all of these areas. And I think one of the meta questions in running CZI is at what point to check in and consider evolving the direction. I mean, obviously, there’s minor execution things that you try to improve along the way. But I want to make sure that we have an awareness that fundamentally these are problems that we’re gonna be working on for 10 or 20 years and not — I think a lot of these things just a consistency of approach, and building trust is more important than constantly evaluating or potentially thrashing. In science, we’ve had the benefit of taking on a number of different projects. So the Human Cell Atlas was one of the original ones. Now one of the next areas that we’re really excited to work on is imaging. There’s a lot of advances in microscopy, but there are a lot of things that we still can’t see. And as engineers, I think one of the things that you can probably appreciate is when you’re trying to debug a system, you really want to get into the code and step through it to see where the thing is breaking down. But we don’t really have a way today to see a white blood cell eat a a virus, right? Like in vivo, right? In the body. To see proteins folding live. And I think that there are certain optical thresholds on the physics that you might not be able to get beyond, but between that and the advances in AI, I do think that it’s possible to give scientists new imaging capacity that hasn’t been possible before. So a lot of what we’re trying to do is — so with the Human Cell Atlas, we took an approach that was very broad and collaborative and somewhat chaotic, even, in a way. And I think we were able to learn some of the lessons from that as we’re now thinking about how we organize the imaging project about, okay, maybe it would be helpful to have more clearly established leadership around it up front. Maybe there are things that rather than having just one big project, there’re gonna be areas where we can just build tools that go into every lab. There’s one software package called [indistinct] that a lot of scientists — right now, the actual technology of microscopes is ahead of scientists’ ability to process the data. There’s this weird mismatch because —and it makes sense, because the NIH funding supports people to basically have a lab. Yeah, tool building is not really subsidized or supported that well.…

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