Artificial intelligence has been advancing rapidly and working away in the background of any number of business and academic applications for decades now. But it’s recently gone a lot more mainstream, with a few regular-person tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard out in the wild and driving a charged combination of fear and excitement.
Even as experts and not-so-experts weigh in on the technology’s potential for good and harm, no one knows for sure how AI will impact all of us in the coming years. One thing we can say is that, as with just about any big society-shifting development, philanthropy is involved behind the scenes. And when it comes to AI, the sector seems just as conflicted as the rest of us.
Depending on who is cutting the checks, the developing field of artificial intelligence represents a technological boon with valuable benefits in healthcare and other areas, something that’s going to put a lot of people out of work, an existential threat to humanity, or some combination of the above.
More than 1,000 technology leaders signed an open letter expressing concerns of the potential risks to society from AI, calling for a “pause” on its development until those risks could be better understood and possibly regulated. Among the best-known of the signatories is Elon Musk, certainly no technophobe. Just last week, the Biden administration announced that seven AI companies, including Amazon, Google and Meta, have agreed to voluntary safeguards on AI development, such as the technology’s ability to create and spread misinformation. It will not be the last we hear of legislation or public oversight of AI.
Despite the many concerns, substantial money is being poured into AI. During the past decade, private investment has totaled about $92 billion globally, with U.S. investors providing the largest share at $47.4 billion in that one year, according to Stanford University’s “A.I. Index 2023 Report.” The Stanford report said that the AI focus area with the most investment in 2022 was medical and healthcare, at $6.1 billion, followed by data management, processing and cloud at $5.9 billion and fintech at $5.5 billion. Meanwhile, by one measure used in the Stanford report, U.S. government spending on AI research was $3.3 billion in 2022.
So with all this funding from business and venture sources, not to mention academia, what’s philanthropy’s role in AI? Pretty substantial, actually. In fact, we’ve been following the sector’s surging interest in AI since at least 2015, when we saw several wealthy Silicon Valley donors starting to crank out grants driven by their growing concerns about the technology. We’ve also covered a handful of science research funders making grants to advance AI, eager for what breakthroughs it might enable. And of course, plenty of higher ed donors have jumped on board, seeking to turn their institutions of choice into leaders within this growing field.
Here are some of the big players in recent years:
Eric and Wendy Schmidt
The former top Google executive and his wife Wendy have demonstrated a truly huge commitment to philanthropic support for science: IP has covered the couple’s mega-giving (backed by their estimated $20 billion net worth) in climate and the environment, and ocean science and ocean conservation.
Eric’s interest in AI is no surprise. He chaired the U.S. National Commission on Artificial Intelligence from 2018 to 2021, and coauthored “The Age of AI: And our Human Future” with Dan Huttenlocher and Henry Kissinger (maybe not be the first person you’d think of in connection with this topic). In 2022, the Schmidts committed $125 million over five years to launch AI2050, through their Schmidt Futures organization. The initiative will support people working on opportunities and problems “that are critical to get right for society to benefit from AI,” according to the announcement of the initiative. Eric evidently sees AI as more than a useful tool: “AI will cause us to rethink what it means to be human,” he said at the time of the announcement.
The organization also committed $148 million to create the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellowship to advance AI in STEM fields; when the fellowship was announced in October of 2022, Schmidt Futures said its support for AI totaled $400 million. No doubt the Schmidts are true believers in the potential of AI, but Eric also owns millions of shares of Google, which has invested heavily in AI, so the technology’s broader adoption benefits him personally, as well.
Paul Allen
The late billionaire cofounder of Microsoft was one of philanthropy’s biggest backers of AI research until his death in 2018, but his influence continues through the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), which he established in 2014. Only a few months before he passed away, Allen increased support for AI2 with an additional $125 million, doubling the organization’s previous budget.
The nonprofit research institute employs a couple of hundred scientists studying a wide range of AI applications, some of which will sound familiar, such as natural language processing and computer vision, as well as less immediately obvious applications, like climate modeling and wildlife protection, among others. In 2019, AI2 opened an Israel office, which employs an additional team of AI researchers.
Allen, who obviously benefitted greatly from the personal computer revolution that Microsoft fueled, was by all evidence a true believer in the power of computer technology to be a tool for the good of society, even beyond useful applications like spreadsheets and data management enabled in the business world.
Thomas Siebel
Thomas Siebel is a tech financier and founder of the software company Siebel Systems, which develops customer relationship management systems for large enterprises. That company was acquired by Oracle, which made Siebel a billionaire. He comes to AI funding from the business side, as founder the C3.ai software company, which develops AI applications for large enterprises in business, government and defense. Siebel’s primary philanthropic vehicle, the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation has supported a range of topics at research universities, including energy, stem cell research and computer science — all unsurprising interests for a funder who spent his life in the technology industry.
Seibel is also cofounder, along with Microsoft and 10 top science research universities and laboratories, of the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute. The philanthropic research consortium launched in early 2020, making grants to accelerate “the benefits of artificial intelligence for business, government and society.” The first round of grants out of C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute were announced in mid-2020, which happened to be the first year of the COVID-19 epidemic, and those grants focused on the use of AI to find meaning in large datasets, the better to understand the epidemic.
More recent research awards, in 2022, went to scientists working on cybersecurity for financial and other key types of information infrastructure, such as energy. Siebel, something of a computer industry legend, is clearly a believer in AI’s potential benefits, and someone who personally benefits from the technology. But he has also acknowledged that AI will put some people out of work, just as previous disruptive technologies have done, and that AI carries potential for abuse by creating false content with the power to reach and manipulate countless people.
Stephen Schwarzman
The founder and CEO of the Blackstone private equity outfit, Giving Pledge signatory Stephen Schwarzman is worth an estimated $20.7 billion. He’s supported education, particularly his alma maters, and has taken criticism in the process, such as for his demands for naming rights attached to big gifts. But his gifts regularly run to tens and hundreds of millions, like a $25 million gift to his alma mater Abington High school, a $150 million gift to Yale and several other major sums.
But those were all topped by his 2018 donation of $350 million to MIT, establishing the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, which will focus on AI and the integration of AI across all fields of study at the university. MIT has long been a leader in the development of AI, but the school said the Schwarzman gift would enable it to nearly double its academic capability in computing and AI.
The AI gift was something of a departure for Schwarzman, whose philanthropy had typically been general in nature, to legacy institutions, rather than in the service of any grander vision. But in the big investment circles that Schwarzman runs in, he would assuredly be deeply immersed in talk of AI and its potential — just remember the study I cited above that estimated business investment in AI totaling $92 billion in 2022 alone. Schwarzman’s AI-focused gift to MIT may represent both a genuine desire to advance the technology’s ability to solve problems and improve the human condition, as well as a desire to solidify the returns on his own investment interests. But perhaps we needn’t be cynical: If you’re an investor and philanthropist and you believe in the social and business value of AI, it would make sense to both support it via philanthropy and your investment bets.
Fred Luddy
Another tech billionaire seeding AI research in academia, Indiana native Fred Luddy in 2019 donated $60 million to establish an AI research initiative at his alma mater, Indiana University. Renamed the IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, the initiative will initially focus on the use of AI in digital health. Luddy founded ServiceNow, a provider of cloud-based IT help desk services. IU has announced a strategic shift toward emphasis on AI and machine learning, particularly in digital health. Given the heavy investment from the private sector on AI in digital health — again, as noted in the Stanford report on AI — Luddy’s gift will help IU feed technology and human talent into the healthcare segment, where it will affect essentially everyone.
Patrick J. McGovern Foundation
The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation was established after the death of its namesake, who built a fortune in technology-related publishing and industry research. In 2021, the foundation merged with the Cloudera Foundation, a philanthropy created by Silicon Valley data and AI software company Cloudera Inc. to bring data analytics technology to the nonprofit sector. The organization’s Data and Society team was to create and share solutions and examples of what’s possible and practical in the field of data and AI, promoting the technology’s uses for social change, equity and ethical use of data.
Reid Hoffman
Billionaire venture capitalist and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman in 2018 gave $2.3 million to establish a chair in AI at the University of Toronto’s iSchool to study the broad impacts of AI on humanity. Hoffman, who has been interested in AI since his student days at Stanford University, contributed $10 million to back the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, a philanthropic joint venture of MIT and Harvard. He’s also on the board of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, where he funds the Hoffman-Yee Research Grants program to back interdisciplinary research to understand the human and societal impact of AI and to develop AI technologies. Also backing the Ethics and Governance fund is the Omidyar Network, with a $10 million contribution; other supporters include the Knight Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and investor Jim Pallotta.
Open Philanthropy
Open Philanthropy, known for its practice of effective altruism, and the study of what it calls global catastrophic risks, such as biosecurity, has invested considerably in the study of unanticipated serious dangers of AI that may accompany progress in the field. According to Open Philanthropy’s website, the organization has to date made $310 million in grants to support technical, strategic and policy research around AI. Among the largest of the grants was $55 million to Georgetown University to create the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a think tank dedicated to policy around technology and national and international security.
Elon Musk
It is not surprising that rocket ship builder Elon Musk, though lately outspoken in his calls for oversight of AI, has long been involved in AI and does not seem to be shying away from the technology. He backed ChatGPT developer OpenAI in its early nonprofit days; he said he kicked in $100 million, but other reports said the sum could not have been more than about $57 million, which is still a lot. And just this month, because he doesn’t run enough companies, Musk announced the launch of his own AI company, xAI, intended to work on complex scientific and mathematical problems, and to “understand the true nature of the universe.” Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of Musk-owned social media app X, formerly known as Twitter, has said that a reshaped X would be “powered by AI.”
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And the list goes on. Other philanthropists and billionaires active in AI include Amin and Julie Khoury, who gave alma mater Northeastern University $50 million to advance AI at the school’s renamed Khoury College of Computer and Information Sciences.
The Kavli Foundation funds efforts to understand the ethical implications of science and technology, and has named AI as a topic of focus. In 2021, the foundation announced two institutes at UC Berkeley and the University of Cambridge, devoted to top-of-mind ethical concerns within science — including artificial intelligence.
Earlier this year, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post calling upon AI developers from all sectors of society to tread carefully into the future of AI. “The time has come for new rules and tools that provide greater transparency on both the data sets used to train AI systems and the values built into their decision-making calculus,” Walker wrote. “We are also calling for more action to address the economic dislocation that will follow the rapid redefinition of work.”
The Rockefeller Foundation operates a residency program for scholars studying the social impact and responsible use of AI, and has also supported efforts to use AI in global health initiatives, such as this one, aimed at infectious disease outbreaks. The MacArthur Foundation has for several years been providing grant support to the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, a nonprofit that brings together organizations from business, academia and civil society to consider collective standards to use AI in safe and socially beneficial ways.
Funders that may not have had specific interests in AI will likely step up giving as the technology develops in fields in which they already have programs, as does Rockefeller. Health/biomedical research is clearly one such area: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, for example, the ambitious philanthropy created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, physician Priscilla Chan, has made several grants to biomedical researchers seeking to use AI.
The above list is incomplete and will likely become far more incomplete in the coming decade, as the field gains momentum and expands, hopefully for better rather than for worse, throughout society.
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