OpenAI offers US$100,000 grants for ideas on AI governance after CEO threatened to pull out of EU over regulation
- The ChatGPT developer will offer 10 equal grants from a fund of US$1 million for ideas on how to address bias and other issues in AI
- OpenAI has been leading the call for regulation, but CEO Sam Altman recently threatened to pull out of the European Union over proposed rules
OpenAI, the start-up behind the popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot, said Thursday it will award 10 equal grants from a fund of US$1 million for experiments in democratic processes to determine how AI software should be governed to address bias and other factors.
The US$100,000 grants will go to recipients who present compelling frameworks for answering such questions as whether AI ought to criticise public figures and what it should consider the “median individual” in the world, according to a blog post announcing the fund.
OpenAI, backed by US$10 billion from Microsoft, has been leading the call for regulation of AI. Yet it recently threatened to pull out of the European Union over proposed rules.
“The current draft of the EU AI Act would be over-regulating, but we have heard it’s going to get pulled back,” OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman told Reuters. “They are still talking about it.”
The start-up’s grants would not fund that much AI research. Salaries for AI engineers and others in the red-hot sector easily top US$100,000 and can exceed US$300,000.
AI systems “should benefit all of humanity and be shaped to be as inclusive as possible”, OpenAI said in the blog post. “We are launching this grant programme to take a first step in this direction.”