BGI is one of the premiere genomics groups working today, and it unquestionably has the highest profile of any currently operating in China. Last month it announced that its long-time chief executive, Jun Chang, was stepping down. Chang had been with the company since it opened in 1999, and its work had made him into a known quantity in China. He had been involved in several national and world-first projects, but after all those years he announced his departure rather quickly. His reason? He was going to start a medical company with a focus on artificial intelligence.

That’s what he tells Nature in an exclusive new interview, at least. Chang seems to have held onto at least some of the startup spirit that has progressed the genomics revolution so quickly. He said that walking away from the biomedical giant made him “a little bit nervous, but also excited, because I know I’m doing the right thing. I am a risk-taker. I am betting all of my credibility on this.”

It’s early on for the project, even from Chang’s perspective, but the interview shows how the genomics researcher is thinking about the future of medicine. He says that the goal is to create an AI program that can take and analyze enormous amounts of data being produced by next-generation DNA sequencing technologies — essentially, he wants to create a company that solves the volume problem that his own research has helped to create.

And it’s quite a volume problem indeed. Chang says he wants his project to incorporate a million genomes — that’s one thousand times larger than the already-ambitious 1000-genomes project. Such a wildly ambitious goal will require a lot of money to drive it, and Chang estimates he’ll need to raise something like US $1.5 billion. He’s confident that money will come. “People have told me I had crazy ideas before… but you know, it turned out pretty good.”

In his mind, this AI solution would work like the holy grail of personal health: it would analyze each user’s personal genomic information and check it against a meticulously created database of genotype-to-phenotype information, constructing a personalized health regimen for each. It could of course tell you which hereditary diseases put you most at risk, but Chang hopes it could also suggest your susceptibility to depression, the best methods for stress relief, and the best exercise regime for your physiology.

Those sorts of complex recommendations aren’t possible today, and that’s why Chang says he needs to increase the amount of genetic information available to scientists by a factor of 10. It’s not quite as insane as it might seem, since the last few years of DNA sequencing have produced as much as the rest of human history combined, but still… 900,000 extra genomes will be a hard sell, in pursuit of a product that is essentially Google Health 2.0.

Perhaps Chang’s commitment to having a ton of raw data for analysis will be the silver bullet that makes his digital health project the one that actually works, or perhaps they will inherit changes in the public’s attitudes about sharing personal (and biological) information. Or, perhaps the initiative will meet with the same public apathy or antipathy that led Google to shutter its own health initiative several years ago.

It’s possible that whatever Chang ends up developing could end up being a direct competitor to Google’s other health project, the shadowy life extension company, Calico. Though Calico’s first product has still yet to be unveiled, it is widely speculated to be another stab at the concept of digital health monitoring. For Google, there’s a serious profit incentive to collect your biological info — nobody is better at monetizing personal information that Google. Could Jun Chang make that same argument to investors?

Chang seems to be one of the classical inventor types, not satisfied with riding the momentum from past successes and genuinely bewildered by the implication that he ought to. His stated reason for BGI is simple enough: it had started to run itself smoothly, no longer presented any large challenges or opportunities to rapidly change the world. So… why stay?

That mentality makes sense for pure scientific work like genome sequencing, but now Chang is pushing into the business world. The main challenge isn’t to create working scientific methods (though that will be part of it), but selling an application of those methods to investors and, eventually, real consumers. It’s a paradigm shift that has stymied many a high-powered intellect, and it will be foremost in investors’ minds as they decide whether Chang’s idea has the potential to succeed where several others have failed.