Announcing the 2018 AI Fellows

The Open Philanthropy Project is proud to announce our first class of AI Fellows – seven very promising machine learning researchers to whom we're collectively recommending a total of about $1.1 million in PhD fellowship support over the next five years. These fellows were selected from more than 180 applicants 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. 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. The AI Fellows have a broad mandate to think through which kinds of AI and ML 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. For more on the Open Philanthropy Project's views about the potential impacts of AI, see our previous blog posts.