The Fellowship of the AI
Office of the Spokesperson
Sam Altman wasn't the only one aiming to get ahead of the UN General Assembly debate today, the US government is stepping forward too:
The Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI (PGIAI) brings together the Department of State, Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI. Together they commit more than $100 million leveraging their combined expertise, resources, and networks to unlock AI’s potential as a powerful tool for sustainable development and improved quality of life in developing countries, while maintaining an unwavering commitment to safety, security, and trustworthiness in AI systems. This effort recognizes that effective and equitable AI solutions must be rooted in an understanding and respect for the diverse cultures, languages, and traditions of the communities they serve. To this end, the PGIAI will focus on three areas: 1) Compute: increasing access to AI models, compute credit, and other AI tools; 2) Capacity: building human technical capacity; and 3) Context: expanding local datasets.
This is seemingly a good thing – unless you're beyond cynical, it's hard to imagine how it's bad to think about the developing world as we enter "The Intelligence Age" – if we are, in fact, entering The Intelligence Age™, which we can debate and it will be debated for years to come! Regardless, it's good to think about and debate such things now, I think.
If there's a criticism to be had here, it might be that $100M (even "more than $100M") between all these companies, not to mention the US government, is a small drop in the bucket when it comes to AI initiatives. I mean, OpenAI is on the verge of raising over 60x that in one round of funding in order to keep the lights servers on and training for a couple more years. Also, yes, most of the pledged money from these companies is in the form of credits, not cash (though that also obviously makes sense here given the initiative).
Anyway, beyond the goals of this specific initiative, the big story here would seem to be the alliance – 9 companions... a Fellowship, if you will – of American AI companies coming together under the banner of the US itself. Hopefully this is an early signal that the government intends to be a "shit umbrella" rather than a "shit funnel".1 Though who knows, that's all subject to change in about six weeks with the election. Still, it's a positive sign versus, say, what the EU is doing.
One more thing: one company not listed: the most valuable company in the world. Perhaps not too surprising given Apple's rather timid approach to AI (and perhaps rightfully so), still, not a great look for the company as it attempts to market their AI prowess to sell the iPhone 16!
M.G. Siegler
1 Aside: I was Googling for this phrase and terminology, which I knew I had heard before, and when I clicked on the link, I had the fun surprise of noticing that I wrote the article, 14 years ago. Perhaps I've been doing this too long...