Donors Pour $583 Million Into Artificial-Intelligence Programs and Research

The robots are taking over, and some of the tech billionaires who drove their rise are stepping up to give big to programs focused on artificial intelligence.

Since 2015, nine wealthy donors have given a total of about $583.5 million to nonprofit institutions that are developing new artificial-intelligence tools and studying the effects of A.I. on human life, according to a Chronicle tally of publicly announced gifts.

Of those nine, five are technology moguls. Among them is the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died Monday. He gave $125 million in February to his Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Seattle nonprofit he launched in 2013. His last gift during his lifetime went to a new research program that is studying ways to instill common sense in artificial-intelligence programs to improve problem-solving without human input.

Allen’s institute operates several programs that center on creating new A.I. systems and tools, and his gift reflects the majority of those donating large sums to A.I.: philanthropists who want to back the creation of new ways of applying artificial intelligence by supporting new research, academic courses, and professorships.

Allen was joined in that effort by others, including Dwight Diercks, an executive at Nvidia, a tech company specializing in A.I. and supercomputing, who gave the Milwaukee School of Engineering $34 million last year for a center for courses on A.I., robotics, and related technologies; and Austin McChord, a cybersecurity entrepreneur who dedicated $20 million of a $50 million donation he gave to his alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology, to hire more A.I. and cybersecurity faculty.

Growing Unease

But there is another group of rich donors who are using their big gifts to address and explore ethical and other implications of artificial intelligence on our lives. Of the nine philanthropists in the Chronicle’s tally, four directed millions to these concerns in the past 20 months, suggesting a growing unease among even masters-of-the-universe types about the potential down sides of artificial intelligence.

Top among this crowd is LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who gave $10 million last year to jump-start the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, a collaboration between MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. The fund is working on developing artificial intelligence that puts ethics first and will serve the public good. Hoffman also recently gave nearly $2.5 million to the University of Toronto to create a professorship to study how future artificial intelligence will affect people’s lives.

Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal and Tesla Motors, gave $10 million in 2015 to the Future of Life Institute, a research organization that studies the risks from advanced technologies and seeks to harness them in ways that will help people flourish rather than self-destruct.

Multimillion-dollar gifts exploring the implications of A.I. are starting to come at a more rapid pace. On Monday the New York financier Stephen Schwarzman gave $350 million to MIT for a new College of Computing, which will focus on developing new breakthroughs and the ethical application of artificial intelligence.

Late last month, he gave $5 million to Harvard Business School to develop case studies and other programs to analyze how A.I. is affecting different industries, individual companies, and financial markets.

The significance of increasing concerns about A.I. is not lost on the companies that have spawned the rise of technology in our everyday lives. Microsoft, which Allen and Bill Gates co-founded, announced late last month a $40 million grant for the third phase of its A.I. for Good program. The grant will go to A.I. for Humanitarian Action, a five-year program aimed at using artificial intelligence to address global problems like disaster response and the refugee crisis.

Big Gifts for Artificial Intelligence