Open Philanthropy recommended a total of approximately $1,840,000 over five years in PhD fellowship support to eleven promising machine learning researchers that together represent the 2022 class of the Open Phil AI Fellowship. This is an estimate because of uncertainty around future year tuition costs and currency exchange rates. This number may be updated as costs are finalized.
These fellows were selected for their academic excellence, technical knowledge, careful reasoning, and interest in making the long-term, large-scale impacts of AI a central focus of their research. This falls within Open Philanthropy’s focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
We believe that progress in artificial intelligence may eventually lead to changes in human civilization that are as large as the agricultural or industrial revolutions; while we think it’s most likely that this would lead to significant improvements in human well-being, we also see significant risks. Open Phil AI Fellows have a broad mandate to think through which kinds of research are likely to be most valuable, to share ideas and form a community with like-minded students and professors, and ultimately to act in the way that they think is most likely to improve outcomes from progress in AI.
The intent of the Open Phil AI Fellowship is both to support a small group of promising researchers and to foster a community with a culture of trust, debate, excitement, and intellectual excellence.
To read more about the 2022 fellows, see Open Philanthropy’s page.