OpenAI Launches $1M Grant Program for Democratic AI Rule Decision-Making Ideas

OpenAI has set up a $1 million grant program to look for democratic ways of making decisions about AI system rules. Ten awardees will receive $100,000 from OpenAI’s nonprofit arm, OpenAI Inc., to develop and test these concepts as part of the startup’s larger push for designing a regulatory infrastructure around generative AI and its many offshoots.

Vote AI

OpenAI is asking interested individuals and teams to share their vision of a pipeline for deciding how generative AI tools should perform based on feedback and votes from the public. OpenAI could then experiment with them and see how well they do in forming an AI development democracy with transparent decision-making. OpenAI has proposed setting up an international organization to issue regulations reminiscent of the International Atomic Energy Agency because the generative AI development outpaces the speed at that existing groups can respond. Applications for OpenAI’s grant are open through June 24. The recipients will share their projects involving at least 500 participants in public reports and open-source code by October 20.

“AGI should benefit all of humanity and be shaped to be as inclusive as possible. We are launching this grant program to take a first step in this direction,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post published today. “While these initial experiments are not (at least for now) intended to be binding for decisions, we hope that they explore decision relevant questions and build novel democratic tools that can more directly inform decisions in the future. The governance of the most powerful systems, as well as decisions regarding their deployment, must have strong public oversight. This grant represents a step to establish democratic processes for overseeing AGI and, ultimately, superintelligence.”

The new project launches just after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s appearance at a U.S. Senate hearing on generative AI and as some tech firms express concern over recent European Union regulation proposals. Meanwhile, the G7 announced last week that it wants to create an international standard for generative AI, with the “Hiroshima AI Process” producing a report by the end of the year.

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