Google Creates a Fund to Advance Accountable AI

With the AI hype cycle displaying no signal of slowing, Google immediately introduced its formal push for funding accountable AI analysis by way of the brand new Digital Futures Venture.

“The Digital Futures Venture is an initiative that goals to deliver collectively a spread of voices to advertise efforts to know and deal with the alternatives and challenges of synthetic intelligence (AI),” Google director Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink writes within the announcement submit. “By means of this undertaking, we’ll assist researchers, arrange convenings, and foster debate on public coverage options to encourage the accountable growth of AI. As a part of the Venture, Google.org is establishing a $20 million fund, which can present grants to main assume tanks and educational establishments world wide to facilitate dialogue and inquiry into this vital know-how.”

Like Google, Microsoft has been speaking about “accountable AI” for years, however with 2023’s large AI push and the ensuing buyer backlash and issues makes this discuss a bit extra significant. Customers utilizing new companies like ChatGPT 4 and Bing AI are experiencing “hallucinations” that talk to the immaturity of this know-how. Content material creators concern AI stealing from them after which letting others repurpose their creations. And companies are involved about customers abusing AI or leaking inside information. So maybe some form of trade commonplace for accountable AI will assist.

On the floor, Google’s announcement immediately appears vaguely paying homage to Microsoft’s AI Assurance Program announcement from June. However it is a bit completely different, as the net large is making a fund to assist advance accountable AI from outdoors the corporate. And it has companions: the Aspen Institute, Brookings Establishment, Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace, the Heart for a New American Safety, the Heart for Strategic and Worldwide Research, the Institute for Safety and Know-how, Management Convention Schooling Fund, MIT Work of the Future, R Road Institute, and SeedAI are all onboard as inaugural grantees of the Digital Futures Venture. Which I assume means they’ve, like Google.org, at the least offered financing.

“AI raises questions on equity, bias, misinformation, safety and the way forward for work,” Hoyer Gosselink provides. “Answering these questions would require deep collaboration amongst trade, academia, governments, and civil society.”