A group of ten leading philanthropies announced a bold new initiative to ensure that AI advances the public interest in the areas of need identified today by Vice President Kamala Harris. Participating foundations are committed to leveraging and aligning grantmaking toward progress on these urgent issues.

These institutions are collectively contributing more than $200 million in funding toward public interest efforts to mitigate AI harms and promote responsible use and innovation. Going forward, they will coordinate on new actions in this space.

The philanthropies that are part of this initiative include: The David and Lucile Packard Foundation; Democracy Fund; the Ford Foundation; Heising-Simons Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Kapor Foundation; Mozilla Foundation; Omidyar Network; Open Society Foundations; and Wallace Global Fund.

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.

An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of five books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.

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