OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has announced a new grant program to sponsor experimentation on setting up rules that AI development should follow.
According to the AI firm, the program will award $100,000 each to ten projects that are focused on creating a system that will foster “a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow, within the bounds defined by the law.”
OpenAI is a non-profit research laboratory dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and others.
OpenAI has made significant contributions to the field of AI, including the development of the GPT-3 language model, the DALL-E image generation system, and the Five AI safety principles. It also offers a number of tools and resources for developers, including the OpenAI API and the OpenAI Playground.
AI and regulations
Despite the excitement about the opportunities and potential of what we can do with the help of AI, there have also been concerns about how the outcome would be. A meeting was held where several tech CEOs and leaders talked about the dangers of AI and why it is important to have guidelines initiated for the development of AI.
“Several issues can undermine democratic processes, such as the failure to adequately represent minority or majority groups, manipulation by special interest groups, insufficiently informed participants, or participation washing,” OpenAI said.
“We are looking for teams who proactively address these failure modes, and demonstrate awareness of the potential flaws and downsides of various approaches.”
OpenAI said that in the pursuit of creating genuinely democratic processes, we acknowledge the lofty standard that must be achieved. Therefore, we consider our endeavors as supplementary measures, not replacements, for government regulations on AI.
Mode of application
Applicants for the grant can apply and submit their proposal here using these questions. According to the directives, the deadline for the application is by 9:00 pm PDT June 24, 2023. While successful applicants, which will be announced on July 14, 2023, will receive a $100,000 grant to pilot their proposal, they are expected to engage at least 500 participants and publish a public report on their findings by October 20, 2023.
The grant program requires any developed code or intellectual property to be made publicly available under an open-source license. The timeline, policy questions, and evaluation factors are provided to guide applicants in their submissions.
The grant aims to foster innovation in democratic processes for governing AI behavior, prioritizing advancements in the process itself rather than specific answers to policy questions.
The application advisory committee includes Colin Megill, Co-Founder of pol.is, Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale, and Aviv Ovadya, Berkman Klein Center.
The application review factors include evaluation, robustness, inclusiveness, representativeness, empowerment of minority opinions, effective moderation, scalability, actionability, and legibility.
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