Silicon Valley’s Next IPO Billionaires Are Coming. Nonprofits Are Ready for Them
Silicon Valley’s Next IPO Billionaires Are Coming. Nonprofits Are Ready for Them
硅谷下一批 IPO 亿万富翁即将诞生，非营利组织已做好准备
A decade ago, Ryan Carrier was a failed hedge fund manager watching as AI systems began to spin out of control. Facebook’s algorithms shook US elections, a Microsoft chatbot said the Holocaust was “made up,” and Tesla’s Autopilot killed its first driver. “There was no governance, oversight, or accountability,” Carrier says. To him, the AI-filled future awaiting his children looked bleak.
十年前，瑞安·卡里尔（Ryan Carrier）还是一名失败的对冲基金经理，当时他眼睁睁地看着人工智能系统开始失控。Facebook 的算法动摇了美国大选，微软的聊天机器人声称大屠杀是“编造的”，特斯拉的自动驾驶系统（Autopilot）导致了首起驾驶员死亡事故。“当时没有任何治理、监督或问责机制，”卡里尔说。在他看来，等待他孩子们的那个充满 AI 的未来显得一片黯淡。
Carrier went on that year to found ForHumanity, a nonprofit organization developing tools for auditing AI systems. It’s raised just hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2016, and is still a minor player in the industry. But that could soon change, because ForHumanity is now among the many nonprofits around the world trying to rein in AI, get animals out of cages, eliminate poverty and sickness, or spread democracy, that are all eager to claim a slice of what’s widely anticipated to be the largest wave of philanthropy in decades.
那一年，卡里尔创立了 ForHumanity，这是一个致力于开发 AI 系统审计工具的非营利组织。自 2016 年以来，该组织仅筹集了数十万美元，在行业内仍属小角色。但这种情况很快就会改变，因为 ForHumanity 现在是全球众多非营利组织中的一员——这些组织有的致力于约束 AI，有的致力于动物保护、消除贫困和疾病，或是传播民主——它们都渴望从这场被广泛预期为几十年来规模最大的慈善浪潮中分得一杯羹。
Two nearly trillion-dollar AI companies, ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Claude creator Anthropic, are expected to go public soon, making hundreds of current and former employees ultrawealthy. Some of them are aligned with a philosophy known as effective altruism that encourages making impactful donations sooner rather than later.
两家市值近万亿美元的 AI 公司——ChatGPT 的开发商 OpenAI 和 Claude 的创造者 Anthropic——预计很快将上市，这将使数百名现任和前任员工变得极其富有。其中一些人信奉一种被称为“有效利他主义”（effective altruism）的哲学，该哲学鼓励人们尽早进行有影响力的捐赠。
Anthropic’s seven founders have pledged to donate 80 percent of their wealth, and the company has agreed to chip in one or three shares for every one its employees commit to giving, depending on when they joined and up to a certain limit.
Anthropic 的七位创始人已承诺捐出其 80% 的财富，公司也已同意，根据员工加入的时间和一定的限额，员工每承诺捐出一股，公司就额外配捐一股或三股。
Rough estimates by a tech industry insider suggest that Anthropic’s IPO, which could happen in September, may result in $15 billion a year in additional philanthropic giving alone. That would be enough to boost total US giving by about 2.5 percent annually—the same as adding four Bill Gates’s, one of the world’s biggest donors. Anthropic declined to comment on the total amount its employees have set aside to donate and the organizations that may benefit.
一位科技行业内部人士的粗略估计显示，Anthropic 的 IPO（可能在 9 月进行）仅此一项就可能带来每年 150 亿美元的额外慈善捐款。这足以使美国年度慈善捐赠总额增加约 2.5%——相当于增加了四个比尔·盖茨（全球最大的捐赠者之一）。Anthropic 拒绝就其员工预留的捐赠总额以及可能受益的组织发表评论。
All that money is far from guaranteed. The IPOs may get delayed or go poorly and leave employees clinging onto their wealth. Industry observers are also concerned that a paralyzing number of charitable options and natural fickleness could prompt workers to keep more for themselves than anticipated.
所有这些资金远非板上钉钉。IPO 可能会推迟或表现不佳，导致员工不得不紧握财富。行业观察人士还担心，令人眼花缭乱的慈善选择和人性的反复无常，可能会促使员工留下的钱比预期的要多。
But competition for would-be donors’ attention is already fierce. Jack Lewars, a consultant who advised 13 ultrarich tech and finance workers on their charitable giving last year, says he’s heard that employees at the AI labs are receiving as many as 20 unsolicited emails a week from groups seeking donations.
但对潜在捐赠者注意力的争夺已经非常激烈。去年为 13 位超级富有的科技和金融从业者提供慈善捐赠咨询的顾问杰克·卢瓦尔斯（Jack Lewars）表示，他听说 AI 实验室的员工每周会收到多达 20 封来自寻求捐款组织的垃圾邮件。
WIRED spoke with 18 nonprofits and approached dozens more to ask how they’re preparing for the potential philanthropy windfall. None of them admitted to sending cold pitches—a tactic that Lewars on his new blog, The Funding Anthropalypse, wrote “has next to no chance of working.” Instead, organizations say they are ramping up hiring, training, marketing, and use of automation to position themselves to attract massive sums of funding and quickly put it to use. One job posting at an education nonprofit even calls out building up relationships at Anthropic specifically as a priority.
《连线》（WIRED）采访了 18 家非营利组织，并联系了数十家其他组织，询问他们如何为潜在的慈善意外之财做准备。没有一家组织承认发送过“冷推销”（cold pitches）——卢瓦尔斯在他的新博客《资金人类末日》（The Funding Anthropalypse）中写道，这种策略“几乎没有任何成功的机会”。相反，各组织表示，他们正在加强招聘、培训、营销和自动化工具的使用，以使自己能够吸引巨额资金并迅速投入使用。一家教育类非营利组织的一则招聘启事甚至明确将“与 Anthropic 建立关系”列为优先事项。
“Everybody’s going to go after these funds,” says Christine Peterson, cofounder of the grantmaking group Foresight Institute, which claims to have funding from Anthropic employees. “It’s going to be a wild ride.”
“每个人都会去争取这些资金，”资助机构 Foresight Institute 的联合创始人克里斯汀·彼得森（Christine Peterson）说，该机构声称已获得 Anthropic 员工的资助。“这将是一场疯狂的旅程。”
The Inside Track / 内部渠道
Like many nonprofit leaders who spoke with WIRED, ForHumanity’s Carrier says he’s focusing more on the work itself than on fundraising. But he recognizes this may be a moment to shift, and has begun wondering how to get into IPO soirees in San Francisco. “I just have to get in that room,” Carrier says.
像许多接受《连线》采访的非营利组织领导人一样，ForHumanity 的卡里尔表示，他更专注于工作本身而非筹款。但他意识到现在可能是转变的时候了，并开始思考如何进入旧金山的 IPO 社交派对。“我必须进入那个房间，”卡里尔说。
Bo Young Lee, CEO of the nonprofit AI4ALL, says she is attending more events, putting out more research, and asking board members, such as AI scientist and entrepreneur Fei-Fei Li, to introduce her to employees at the AI labs. Her organization trains young adults across the US to develop their own AI models, with the goal of diversifying the tech workforce. Lee says she’s setting “ambitious” fundraising goals because she’s confident the money will come, though introductory meetings haven’t materialized yet.
非营利组织 AI4ALL 的首席执行官 Bo Young Lee 表示，她正在参加更多的活动，发布更多的研究成果，并请求董事会成员（如 AI 科学家兼企业家李飞飞）将她介绍给 AI 实验室的员工。她的组织培训全美的年轻人开发自己的 AI 模型，目标是实现科技劳动力的多元化。Lee 表示，她正在设定“雄心勃勃”的筹款目标，因为她相信资金会到来，尽管目前尚未实现任何介绍性会面。
Buck Shlegeris is the CEO of Redwood Research, a Berkeley, California-based nonprofit that’s part of a growing set of small organizations pursuing what’s broadly defined as AI safety. From his perspective, targeting individual donors isn’t an optimal strategy.
巴克·施莱格里斯（Buck Shlegeris）是 Redwood Research 的首席执行官，这是一家位于加州伯克利的非营利组织，属于日益增多的致力于广义“AI 安全”的小型组织之一。在他看来，针对个人捐赠者并不是最佳策略。
Redwood has received millions of dollars from grantmaking groups, such as Coefficient Giving and Survival and Flourishing Fund, that pool together donations from individuals and subscribe to the effective altruism movement. Shlegeris believes that new money will flow to these intermediaries and then continue to trickle down to Redwood and others.
Redwood 已从 Coefficient Giving 和 Survival and Flourishing Fund 等资助团体获得了数百万美元，这些团体汇集了来自个人的捐款，并认同“有效利他主义”运动。施莱格里斯认为，新的资金将流向这些中介机构，然后继续流向 Redwood 等组织。
He says he wants to accelerate training staffers on becoming managers with the expectation that big sums of money will enable teams to grow and take on “crazy expensive projects,” like automating safety research and training Redwood’s own models. The nonprofit’s overall goal is to minimize the risk that AI could somehow lead to human extinction, which Shlegeris says he fears has a “really strong chance” of happening.
他说，他希望加快培训员工成为管理人员，因为他预计巨额资金将使团队能够壮大并承担“极其昂贵的项目”，例如自动化安全研究和训练 Redwood 自己的模型。该非营利组织的总体目标是最大限度地降低 AI 可能导致人类灭绝的风险，施莱格里斯表示，他担心这种情况发生的“可能性非常大”。
A subset of AI safety research is centered on preventing the technology from being used in the creation of bioweapons. Venture capitalist Geoff Ralston recently helped author an action plan that calls for raising $2.5 billion over the next five years to address AI biosecurity. He plans to solicit donations from those who stand to benefit from the IPO windfall. “The folks at frontier labs understand the threat vectors created by AI better than anyone,” Ralston says.
AI 安全研究的一个分支集中在防止该技术被用于制造生物武器。风险投资家杰夫·拉尔斯顿（Geoff Ralston）最近参与撰写了一份行动计划，呼吁在未来五年内筹集 25 亿美元以应对 AI 生物安全问题。他计划向那些将从 IPO 意外之财中受益的人寻求捐款。“前沿实验室的人比任何人都更了解 AI 带来的威胁向量，”拉尔斯顿说。
Several grantmakers influential in effective altruism circles are preparing for the giving wave by helping newer nonprofits level up their administration and bookkeeping. The goal is to ensure more organizations are ready to spend the expected influx of donations.
在有效利他主义圈子中具有影响力的几位资助者正在为这波捐赠浪潮做准备，帮助较新的非营利组织提升其行政和簿记水平。其目标是确保更多的组织准备好使用预期的捐款流入。