Update on the OpenAI Foundation
A note from Bret Taylor, Chair of the Board of Directors of the OpenAI Foundation
Last fall, OpenAI announced its recapitalization, paving the way for the OpenAI Foundation to access significant resources. Today, we’re sharing how the Foundation is starting to put that support to work.
Our mission
Our mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. This is a multi-faceted endeavor.
AI is already changing how people work, learn, and access care. It has the potential to unlock extraordinary benefits—faster medical breakthroughs, accelerated scientific discovery, more personalized services in healthcare and education, new tools for creativity and invention, higher productivity and economic growth, improved public services like transportation systems, and so much more. Our belief in this potential has guided OpenAI since its founding.
But building powerful systems to benefit humanity is only a part of the work of our mission. Advanced AI models will also present new challenges that are already surfacing, and we need to be prepared to identify these challenges and develop solutions to address them.
These are the two dimensions of what we’re building the Foundation to do. We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives—while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient, as AI advances.
This work is just beginning. Over the next year, as we quickly ramp up, the Foundation expects to invest at least $1 billion across life sciences and curing diseases, jobs and economic impact, AI resilience, and community programs. This includes early investments toward our previously announced $25 billion commitment to curing diseases and AI resilience.
In the months ahead, we will share updates in each of these areas as we build, learn, and refine our approach and advance our mission with new grants and programs.
Life Sciences & Curing Diseases1
We’re starting with Life Sciences & Curing Diseases, where we believe that AI has enormous potential to speed up scientific and medical progress to save and improve lives. We are already seeing many early signs of AI’s abilities in these areas. Researchers are using AI to better understand diseases, explore new ways to prevent and treat them, and move ideas from the lab to patients faster.
At the Foundation, we’ve identified three initial focus areas where we think this work could make a real difference:
AI for Alzheimer’s: Alzheimer’s is one of the hardest and most heartbreaking diseases families face – and one of the toughest problems in medicine. AI’s ability to reason across complex data could help researchers uncover new insights. We will be partnering with leading research institutions, with an initial focus on mapping disease pathways, detecting biomarkers for clinical care and clinical trials, and accelerating personalization of treatments – including, where possible, repurposing existing FDA-approved molecules.
Public Data for Health: Many of medicine’s biggest advances have been made possible by shared scientific data, and public access to data is essential to deliver the promise of AI for scientific breakthroughs. We will help partners create and expand open, high-quality datasets – and, where appropriate, help responsibly open previously closed ones – so researchers everywhere can leverage AI and use data to drive progress across diseases.
Accelerating Progress on High-Mortality and High-Burden Diseases: We believe AI can help lead to scientific breakthroughs, and lower the cost and risk of developing or repurposing therapies, particularly in high-mortality and high-burden disease areas that are underfunded. We will bring together AI researchers and disease experts, starting with a focused workshop to identify how best to empower scientists with AI tools and surface promising opportunities.
Jacob Trefethen will lead this work as Head of Life Sciences and Curing Diseases. He is joining from Coefficient Giving, where he oversaw more than $500 million in grantmaking to science and health.
Jobs and Economic Impact
AI will change the nature of work and the economy—bringing challenges as well as opportunities. We recognize this as profoundly important. The Foundation has begun engaging with experts and communities—civil society, small business owners, unions, leading economists, policymakers, and others—to develop and fund practical solutions in this space. We intend to deploy substantial resources behind the most promising approaches and will share more in the coming weeks.
AI Resilience
As previously announced, AI Resilience will also be one of our primary programs. This work concentrates on the new challenges that inevitably arise from more capable AI, so people can fully benefit from AI in ways that support and expand human agency, creativity, and opportunity.
We will initially focus on a few areas where concerns about impact are already apparent, and where we think early work can make a real difference:
AI Impact on Children & Youth: We want to help make sure AI tools are safe for young people and support healthy development. That includes investing in data-driven research and evaluation, and working across fields to help identify the right safeguards that help assure safe and beneficial interactions between AI and children and youth.
Biosecurity: We want to strengthen how society prepares for potential biological threats—both naturally occurring and AI enabled outbreaks. That includes improving detection, prevention, and mitigation.
AI Model Safety: We want AI systems to be safer by default. That means supporting independent testing and evaluations, developing new and stronger industry standards, and funding foundational research that helps to avoid safety issues or to detect and address them early.
Wojciech Zaremba, a co-founder of OpenAI, is joining the Foundation as Head of AI Resilience to lead this work.
Supporting communities
We will soon announce the final wave of grants from the initial People-First AI Fund, along with more detail on what comes next.
Through this work—launched at the recommendation of our Nonprofit Commission—we’ve seen that community-based organizations are uniquely positioned to help people navigate AI-driven change. These high-trust groups are closest to the communities they serve and lead critical work on the ground.
We will continue investing in initiatives that support communities, with a focus on helping people understand AI, benefit from its capabilities, and adapt to the changes it brings.
Building our team
In addition to Wojciech and Jacob, we’re building a team to advance our work at scale.
In mid-April, Anna Makanju is joining as Head of AI for Civil Society and Philanthropy to lead the Foundation’s work in leveraging AI to help nonprofits, NGOs, philanthropic institutions, and the broader civil society ecosystem accelerate and scale their impact. Anna previously served as VP of Global Impact at OpenAI. We look forward to sharing more about this work in the coming weeks.
Robert Kaiden is joining as Chief Financial Officer. Robert previously held senior leadership roles at Deloitte, Twitter, and Inspirato. He will help ensure the Foundation operates with strong financial discipline as we grow.
Jeff Arnold is joining as Director of Operations. Jeff was an early member of OpenAI. He has spent his career building and scaling companies, including in leadership roles at Oracle and Dropbox. He will help build the operational systems needed to support the Foundation’s goals.
The Foundation Board is also searching for an Executive Director. We’ll continue adding to the team over the coming months.
What comes next
We are still at the beginning of what AI can make possible.
The opportunity—and responsibility—is to make sure these technologies lead to real progress for people. We will learn quickly, work closely with partners, and invest in solutions that can scale and transform.
Our goal is to help more people solve the hardest problems, take better care of the people they love, and build fulfilling lives that were previously out of reach.
We’re excited for the work ahead and will be sharing more in the coming months.
1 Previously referred to as Health & Curing Diseases, this program has been renamed Life Sciences to reflect the Foundation’s focus on advancing biology and medical research as core to curing disease.