OpenAI Foundation pledges to strengthen ChatGPT safeguards
The nonprofit connected to one of the world’s wealthiest artificial intelligence startups said it will start investing $1 billion to find a cure for Alzheimer’s and other philanthropic causes, in addition to developing safeguards for its flagship ChatGPT chatbot’s interactions with children.
OpenAI Foundation launched late last year after OpenAI restructured itself into a for-profit company, drawing scrutiny from AI critics, former OpenAI employees and Attorney General Rob Bonta, who took issue with reports of ChatGPT’s interactions with children.
The San Francisco startup made headlines last year after a series of lawsuits in which parents sued the company and its chief executive, Sam Altman, alleging that ChatGPT had manipulated their children and loved ones into taking their lives or encouraged mental delusions.
On Tuesday, OpenAI Foundation said it had tapped one of its co-founders, Wojciech Zaremba, to oversee programs on modeling AI safety, resilience and biosecurity and to strengthen safeguards on its flagship product.
“We want to help make sure AI tools are safe for young people and support healthy development. That includes investing in data-driven research and evaluation, and working across fields to help identify the right safeguards that help assure safe and beneficial interactions between AI and children and youth,” the company foundation said in a blog post.
“We want AI systems to be safer by default. That means supporting independent testing and evaluations, developing new and stronger industry standards, and funding foundational research that helps to avoid safety issues or to detect and address them early.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom, an AI enthusiast, and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, have come out in support of curtailing children’s access to social media and AI companion chatbots.
Altman initially founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit. In October, the company restructured as a public benefit corporation, which is a for-profit company working towards the public benefit. OpenAI Foundation has a $130 billion ownership stake in the startup, making it one of the wealthiest philanthropic ventures in the world.
As part of that mission, OpenAI Foundation said Tuesday it would invest at least $1 billion over the next year “across life sciences and curing diseases, jobs and economic impact, AI resilience, and community programs.”
“We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives — while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient, as AI advances,” the foundation wrote.
In addition to funding research to cure Alzheimer’s, the foundation said it would fund research into creating datasets on public health and bring AI experts and researchers together to study therapies for “high-mortality and high-burden disease areas that are underfunded.”
