On Aug. 12, 2024, The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced AI@HHMI, a $500 million investment over the next 10 years to support artificial intelligence-driven projects in the life sciences. As the largest private biomedical research organization in the United States, HHMI aims to explore the full promise of AI to accelerate scientific discovery at its Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, and at the more than 300 HHMI-affiliated labs.

While AI@HHMI will be centered at Janelia, it will drive AI-focused collaborations across the broader HHMI community. Through this effort, hundreds of HHMI scientists will help design and execute a wide range of ambitious AI-based biomedical research projects.

AI@HHMI will adopt an approach to research dubbed “AI-in-the-Loop,” which will place AI at the heart of the scientific process to accelerate discovery and catalyze an explosion of knowledge about the complexities of life. AI systems will be used to help design experiments, build automated pipelines, collect high-quality “AI-ready” data, and create generalizable learning models capable of inferring underlying principles within that data.