(Financial Times) Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is launching a $125mn philanthropic project to fund artificial intelligence research that solves “hard problems” in the field, including issues of bias, harm and misuse, geopolitical conflict, and scientific limitations of the technology.
The fund, known as AI2050, will be paid out over five years to individual academics, and co-chaired by Schmidt, and James Manyika, Google’s new head of technology and society, in a “personal capacity”.
The initiative launches at a time when corporations, governments and civil society are widely debating the societal impacts of artificial intelligence, including how to neutralise its toxic consequences, and its effect on jobs and the economy. Issues undermining trust in AI include the poisoning of public discourse by social networking algorithms, and deliberate weaponization of AI technologies such as deepfakes.
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