Google Creates a Fund to Advance Responsible AI

With the AI hype cycle showing no sign of slowing, Google today announced its formal push for funding responsible AI research via the new Digital Futures Project.

“The Digital Futures Project is an initiative that aims to bring together a range of voices to promote efforts to understand and address the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI),” Google director Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink writes in the announcement post. “Through this project, we’ll support researchers, organize convenings, and foster debate on public policy solutions to encourage the responsible development of AI. As part of the Project, Google.org is establishing a $20 million fund, which will provide grants to leading think tanks and academic institutions around the world to facilitate dialogue and inquiry into this important technology.”

Like Google, Microsoft has been talking about “responsible AI” for years, but with 2023’s big AI push and the resulting customer backlash and concerns makes this talk a bit more meaningful. Consumers using new services like ChatGPT 4 and Bing AI are experiencing “hallucinations” that speak to the immaturity of this technology. Content creators fear AI stealing from them and then letting others repurpose their creations. And businesses are concerned about users abusing AI or leaking internal data. So perhaps some kind of industry standard for responsible AI will help.

On the surface, Google’s announcement today seems vaguely reminiscent of Microsoft’s AI Assurance Program announcement from June. But this is a bit different, as the online giant is creating a fund to help advance responsible AI from outside the company. And it has partners: the Aspen Institute, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Center for a New American Security, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Institute for Security and Technology, Leadership Conference Education Fund, MIT Work of the Future, R Street Institute, and SeedAI are all onboard as inaugural grantees of the Digital Futures Project. Which I assume means they have, like Google.org, at least provided financing.

“AI raises questions about fairness, bias, misinformation, security and the future of work,” Hoyer Gosselink adds. “Answering these questions will require deep collaboration among industry, academia, governments, and civil society.”