Forward of Wednesday’s AI-focused private Congressional meeting with tech giants, Google this morning introduced a brand new initiative aimed toward supporting researchers and public coverage options round AI with the debut of the Digital Futures Undertaking. As a part of the hassle, Google’s charitable arm Google.org is establishing a $20 million fund that may present grants to suppose tanks and educational establishments creating AI experience.
Explains Google.org director Brigitte Hoyer, “AI has the potential to make our lives simpler and deal with a few of society’s most advanced challenges — like stopping illness, making cities work higher, and predicting pure disasters. Nevertheless it additionally raises questions on equity, bias, misinformation, safety, and the way forward for work.”
The tech large says it goals to fund unbiased thinkers who’re trying into matters like how AI will impression world safety or how it may be used to reinforce the safety of establishments and enterprises; how AI will impression labor and the way we will transition the workforce to the AI jobs of the long run; how governments can use AI to spice up productiveness and financial progress; and what sorts of governance construction and cross-industry efforts can finest promote accountable AI innovation.
The inaugural grantees of the Digital Futures Fund embrace the Aspen Institute, Brookings Establishment, Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace, the Middle for a New American Safety, the Middle for Strategic and Worldwide Research, the Institute for Safety and Expertise, Management Convention Schooling Fund, MIT Work of the Future, R Road Institute and SeedAI.
Google says that the fund will assist organizations all over the world, not simply within the U.S., and it’ll have extra to share on that entrance quickly.
“Accountable AI” has been a subject of elevated curiosity as AI advances have picked up pace. Earlier this yr, 4 of the highest gamers in AI together with OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic in addition to Google announced a new industry body, the Frontier Mannequin Discussion board, with the purpose of guaranteeing the “secure and accountable developer of AI fashions. President Biden also met with seven AI companies on the White Home to agree to voluntary safeguards round AI. Past the U.S., Europe has additionally been taking steps toward agreeing on an AI rulebook.
Later this week, U.S. Congress will flip its consideration to AI in a closed-door assembly with all 100 senators who will hear from Elon Musk, who recently announced a new AI organization, xAI, together with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft co-founder Invoice Gates, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and different tech leaders, together with the CEOs of IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palantir.
Google, in the meantime, had printed its own set of AI principles in 2018 and continues to publish AI research. Nonetheless, the corporate had grown cautious across the improvement and launch of AI applied sciences, leading to researcher departures and the opportunity for Microsoft and OpenAI to take the lead with ChatGPT and a partnership that built-in OpenAI applied sciences into Bing and different Microsoft merchandise.
With a spotlight now on collaboration, Google as we speak mentioned getting AI proper will take a couple of firm.
“We hope the Digital Futures Undertaking and this fund will assist many others throughout academia and civil society to advance unbiased analysis on AI that helps this transformational know-how profit everybody,” Gosselink mentioned.
