The Open Philanthropy Project awarded a grant of $30 million ($10 million per year for 3 years) in general support to OpenAI. This grant initiates a partnership between the Open Philanthropy Project and OpenAI, in which Holden Karnofsky (Open Philanthropy’s Executive Director) will join OpenAI’s Board of Directors and, jointly with one other Board member, oversee OpenAI’s safety and governance work.
OpenAI, a non-profit organization founded in 2015, focuses on building safe artificial intelligence (AI) and ensuring AI’s benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Currently, most of its work is on advancing the state of the art in technical AI research. This grant to OpenAI falls within Open Philanthropy's work on potential risks from advanced AI.
Open Philanthropy expects the primary benefits of this grant to stem from its partnership with OpenAI, rather than simply from contributing funding toward OpenAI’s work. While Open Philanthropy would also expect general support for OpenAI to be likely beneficial on its own, the case for this grant hinges on the benefits it anticipates from the partnership, particularly the opportunity to help play a role in OpenAI’s approach to safety and governance issues.