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

By  Maria Di Mento
October 15, 2018
Donors Pour $583 Million Into Artificial-Intelligence Programs and Research 1
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

Year gift announcedDonorDonor’s locationAmount Recipient
2018 Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone Group investment firm New York $350 million MIT (Cambridge, Mass.) to establish the Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing and to expand programs in artificial intelligence, computer science, and data science
2018 Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft Seattle $125 million Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Seattle) to back a research program seeking to instill common sense in artificial intelligence
2017 Austin McChord, founder of Datto, a cybersecurity company Norwalk, Conn. $20 million Rochester Institute of Technology (N.Y.) to hire cybersecurity and artificial-intelligence faculty at the school
2017 Dwight Diercks, executive at Nvidia, an artificial-intelligence and supercomputing company Santa Clara, Calif. $34 million Milwaukee School of Engineering for a computational engineering center that will house courses in artificial-intelligence, cybersecurity, and related programs
2018 Neil Bluhm, co-founder of JMB Realty Corporation Chicago $25 million Northwestern Medicine (Chicago) to develop artificial intelligence that aims to improve cardiovascular care and to support research at the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute
2015 Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla Motors Los Angeles $10 million Future of Life Institute (Cambridge, Mass.) to establish a global research program on artificial intelligence and its potential to help humankind
2017 Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn Mountain View, Calif. $10 million Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund (Cambridge, Mass.), a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and Harvard U.'s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to develop ethical artificial intelligence to serve humanity
2018 Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone Group investment firm New York $5 million Harvard Business School (Cambridge, Mass.) to support the development of case studies and other programming that explore the implications of artificial intelligence on industries, business, and markets
2018 Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn Mountain View, Calif. $2.45 million University of Toronto to establish a professorship to study how the new era of artificial intelligence will affect people’s lives
2016 Fredric Levin, lawyer Pensacola, Fla. $1 million Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (Pensacola, Fla.) for a research facility on artificial intelligence
2017 Jim Pallotta, founder of the Raptor Group, an investment firm Boston $1 million Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund (Cambridge, Mass.)
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Fundraising from IndividualsMajor-Gift Fundraising
Maria Di Mento
Maria directs the annual Philanthropy 50, a comprehensive report on America’s most generous donors. She writes about wealthy philanthropists, arts organizations, key trends and insights related to high-net-worth donors, and other topics.
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