Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, in 2016 founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an LLC that invests in charities and businesses that the couple believe can help the world and help cure diseases. Now the philanthropic organization is making its first acquisition: It has purchased Meta, an artificial intelligence startup for the medical community.

Meta co-founder and CEO Sam Molyneux announced the deal in a Facebook post Monday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The startup uses an AI-powered search engine that helps researchers and doctors quickly find the most relevant information in a database of science research papers. Meta says it can recognize authors and heavily cited papers, which allows it to return the most important research, instead of providing results solely based on keywords or SEO.

The tool has a database of 26 million papers, according to TechCrunch. It provides the full text of 18,000 journals and other publications.

Maybe most important to helping the Initiative work toward its long-term goal: While Meta currently uses a paid subscription model, it will become free for anyone to use. The idea is that doctors can use it to strengthen their research and investors can use it for background information into promising health fields, but it's open to anyone with a knack for science.

It's the kind of open sourcing that has recently become common in the coding world. In December, Google's DeepMind and Elon Musk's OpenAI both announced they'd allow the public to use their AI systems. Before that, Facebook open sourced FastText, its high-powered AI software that can learn 1 billion words in 10 minutes.

The hope is that opening up the tools for everyone will foster innovation at a faster speed--and make the AI stronger through repeated use. In Meta's case, the theory is that allowing more people to get their hands on the tool could also increase the chance of a medical breakthrough.

That's not to say that, though, that a research database driven by A.I. doesn't have a downside. There is the potential for biases inherent to the people using the system to affect results, according to one expert in the field. "Depending on how the platform is built and how its learning engines are structured, it might create an artificial bias toward certain research," says Josh Sutton, head of data and A.I. at marketing giant Publicis-Sapient. So papers from, say, the Cleveland Clinic might get clicked more often, while research that's just as robust from a smaller institution--or originally written in a less common language--might get buried. "You could end up with machine learning propagating groupthink," Sutton says.

Still, he was careful to note that the overall upside could be significant. "It's an innovative use of the technology that's out there in a way that will benefit society at large," Sutton says.

Molyneux and his sister, Amy, founded the company in 2010. It has received $7.5 million in funding to date, including $4.5 million from Rho Canada Ventures.

In September, Zuckerberg and Chan, a pediatrician, announced they were committing $3 billion to the Initiative and creating the BioHub, a San Francisco-based lab for scientists and engineers to work on finding cures.