Google Going ‘For Good’? With AI Getting So Much Bad Press, Company To Grant $25 Million To Market Its ‘Benefic’ Uses

Political elites, civil society and even tech business executives have raised alarm over the havoc that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could wreck in society. Their concerns are not without merit. However, Google has now embarked on a mission to show the ‘good’ side of AI.

Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., announced yesterday (29 October) a new global fund with an annual corpus of $25 million. The grants under it, will be directed towards AI projects that aim to solve humanitarian and environmental problems, report Reuters.

The “AI Impact Challenge”, which is part of the broader Google initiative ‘AI for Social Good”, is expected to help organisations in leveraging Google’s expertise in machine learning (a subset of AI) to solve some of the pressing problems of our time. Google’s rival, Microsoft Corp. has also committed $115 million to its "AI for Good" initiative with similar aims.

These social projects are being undertaken by global tech giants as the backlash against their subversive activities (like military and censorship) is growing stronger. Google decided to drop a US Department of Defense’s AI contract after employees protested. They also criticised the company’s alleged plans to launch a censored search engine in China.