These AI Barons Are Ready to Give Away Their Fortunes
These AI Barons Are Ready to Give Away Their Fortunes
这些人工智能巨头准备捐出他们的财富
David Silver is a billionaire, sort of. His stake in Ineffable Intelligence—the artificial intelligence lab he founded—is worth an ungodly fortune. But he stands to collect none of that money himself. He set things up that way. 大卫·西尔弗（David Silver）算是一位亿万富翁。他在自己创立的人工智能实验室 Ineffable Intelligence 持有的股份价值连城，但他本人并不打算从中获取任何金钱。他从一开始就做好了这样的安排。
Between 2013 and 2025, Silver worked as a researcher at Google DeepMind. He specialized in reinforcement learning, a method of teaching an AI model through positive and negative feedback. In 2016, he led the development of AlphaGo, which became the first AI to defeat a human champion in the game of Go and was heralded as a narrow form of superintelligence. Silver left to start Ineffable Intelligence in January, betting that reinforcement learning breakthroughs will close the gap between human and machine cognition across the board. 2013 年至 2025 年间，西尔弗在谷歌 DeepMind 担任研究员。他专注于强化学习，这是一种通过正向和负向反馈来训练人工智能模型的方法。2016 年，他领导开发了 AlphaGo，这是第一个在围棋比赛中击败人类冠军的人工智能，被誉为一种狭义的超级智能。西尔弗于今年 1 月离职并创立了 Ineffable Intelligence，他押注强化学习的突破将全面缩小人类认知与机器认知之间的差距。
When he started Ineffable Intelligence, Silver raised $1.1 billion from investors at a $5.1 billion valuation, reportedly the largest seed round in Europe’s history. He also vowed to donate all the money he makes from any future sale of his company to charity. 在创立 Ineffable Intelligence 时，西尔弗以 51 亿美元的估值从投资者那里筹集了 11 亿美元，据报道这是欧洲历史上规模最大的种子轮融资。他还发誓要将未来出售公司所得的所有收益全部捐给慈善机构。
“I was thinking very deeply about what I could do to have the maximum impact on the world,” Silver tells WIRED in an interview at his office in Kings Cross, London, around the corner from DeepMind’s headquarters. “Not just through the work I do, but through the finance I arrive at in the process.” “我一直在深入思考，我能做些什么来对世界产生最大的影响，”西尔弗在伦敦国王十字区办公室接受《连线》（WIRED）采访时说，他的办公室就在 DeepMind 总部附近。“不仅仅是通过我的工作，还要通过我在这个过程中获得的财富。”
He’ll choose how to deploy the funds after he sells his company, he says, but his ambition is to save as many lives as possible. 他说，他会在出售公司后决定如何分配这些资金，但他的目标是尽可能多地拯救生命。
Silver is the latest in a growing line of AI founders to pledge equity proceeds to charity. Others include Mustafa Suleyman, a DeepMind cofounder and the CEO of AI at Microsoft, and Anton Osika, the founder of automated coding platform Lovable. If OpenAI and Anthropic go public as planned, minting thousands of new millionaires in the process, the AI industry could soon come to represent an increasingly outsize proportion of tech philanthropy. 西尔弗是越来越多承诺将股权收益捐赠给慈善机构的人工智能创始人之一。其他人还包括 DeepMind 联合创始人、微软人工智能首席执行官穆斯塔法·苏莱曼（Mustafa Suleyman），以及自动化编码平台 Lovable 的创始人安东·奥西卡（Anton Osika）。如果 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 按计划上市并在此过程中造就数千名新百万富翁，人工智能行业很快将在科技慈善事业中占据越来越大的比例。
Along with a new generation of techno-philanthropists, though, comes a tangle of unresolved questions: Is philanthropy the most appropriate way to redistribute wealth? To what degree are megadonors responsible for some of the problems they aim to fix? Could a pledge that scales with a company’s success come to justify unsavory business practices or reckless accelerationism? And is this go-around any different from previous iterations of Silicon Valley giving? 然而，随着新一代科技慈善家的出现，一系列悬而未决的问题也随之而来：慈善事业是重新分配财富最合适的方式吗？超级捐赠者对他们试图解决的问题负有多大责任？随着公司成功而增加的捐赠承诺，是否会成为不道德商业行为或鲁莽加速主义的借口？这一次与硅谷以往的捐赠模式有什么不同吗？
“You can’t necessarily appeal to capitalism to solve some of the problems created by capitalist practices themselves … the exacerbation of extreme wealth concentration and massive inequalities,” says Linsey McGoey, professor of sociology at the University of Essex and author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift. “It’s like calling upon the arsonist to hose down the house he’s just set on fire.” “你未必能依靠资本主义来解决由资本主义实践本身所产生的一些问题……比如极端财富集中和巨大的不平等加剧，”埃塞克斯大学社会学教授、《没有免费的礼物》（No Such Thing as a Free Gift）一书的作者林西·麦戈伊（Linsey McGoey）说。“这就像是请纵火犯去扑灭他刚刚点燃的房子。”
Silver formalized his charitable commitment through Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs to give away their wealth. Unlike the Giving Pledge, a public but nonbinding commitment, Founders Pledge requires participants to enter into a contract. “The choice of making a binding pledge was very important,” says Silver. 西尔弗通过“创始人承诺”（Founders Pledge）将其慈善承诺正式化，这是一个帮助企业家捐赠财富的非营利组织。与公开但无约束力的“捐赠誓言”（Giving Pledge）不同，“创始人承诺”要求参与者签署合同。西尔弗说：“做出具有约束力的承诺这一选择非常重要。”
Founders Pledge has been around since 2015. But the value of pledges recorded by the nonprofit has soared recently, from $400 million in 2023 to $4 billion so far this year. The AI industry now accounts for a third of the lifetime pledge total. “创始人承诺”自 2015 年以来一直存在。但该非营利组织记录的承诺价值近期飙升，从 2023 年的 4 亿美元增加到今年迄今的 40 亿美元。人工智能行业目前占其历史承诺总额的三分之一。
The organization’s goal, according to cofounder David Goldberg, is to identify “the very best ways to deploy capital at scale to make the world better.” It has frequently been lumped together with effective altruism, which encourages people to amass wealth in order to give it away, to rely on statistics rather than emotion, and to prioritize causes likely to have the biggest impact in the distant future. But despite the commonalities, Goldberg isn’t a fan of the comparison; Founders Pledge is concerned with human suffering in the present. “We’re far more humanist,” he says. 据联合创始人戴维·戈德堡（David Goldberg）称，该组织的目标是确定“大规模配置资本以改善世界的最佳方式”。它经常被与“有效利他主义”混为一谈，后者鼓励人们积累财富以便捐赠，依靠统计数据而非情感，并优先考虑那些在遥远的未来可能产生最大影响的事业。但尽管有共同点，戈德堡并不喜欢这种比较；“创始人承诺”关注的是当下的苦难。他说：“我们更具人文主义色彩。”
Silver considers himself an effective altruist but says his “flavor is about the here and now.” Accordingly, Silver plans to funnel his pledge proceeds to charities, like the Malaria Foundation, equipped to save the greatest number of lives in the near term. “I find it hard to justify focusing on the galactic future of humanity when there are millions of people suffering and dying today,” he says. 西尔弗认为自己是一名有效利他主义者，但他表示他的“风格是关注当下”。因此，西尔弗计划将他的承诺收益投入到像疟疾基金会（Malaria Foundation）这样的慈善机构，这些机构有能力在短期内拯救最多的生命。他说：“当今天有数百万人正在受苦和死亡时，我很难证明关注人类遥远的未来是合理的。”
Osika, the Lovable founder, who has pledged to give away half of his equity proceeds, doesn’t identify as an effective altruist, but he shares the belief that amassing wealth by succeeding in business is the best way for him to maximize his personal impact on the world. “I think it’s a very good thing for people who are very thoughtful about the future of humanity to build [AI],” he tells WIRED. Lovable 的创始人奥西卡承诺捐出他一半的股权收益，他不认为自己是有效利他主义者，但他认同这样一种信念：通过商业成功积累财富是他最大限度地发挥个人对世界影响力的最佳方式。他告诉《连线》：“我认为，对于那些深思熟虑人类未来的人来说，构建 [AI] 是一件非常好的事情。”
The Gates Foundation—the most famous embodiment of techno-philanthropy—has given away more than $100 billion to causes targeting poverty and disease in the 25 years since it was founded by Bill and Melinda Gates. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have pledged to donate their $200 billion fortune to scientific research through their own foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Both have been held up as shining examples of how an entrepreneurial mindset can translate into effective philanthropy and how the profit motive can be harnessed for good. 盖茨基金会是科技慈善事业最著名的体现，自比尔和梅琳达·盖茨创立以来的 25 年里，该基金会已向针对贫困和疾病的事业捐赠了超过 1000 亿美元。Meta 创始人马克·扎克伯格及其妻子普莉希拉·陈承诺通过他们自己的基金会“陈-扎克伯格倡议”（Chan Zuckerberg Initiative）将他们 2000 亿美元的财富捐赠给科学研究。这两者都被视为光辉典范，展示了创业思维如何转化为有效的慈善事业，以及如何利用利润动机来造福社会。
The new generation of AI philanthropists appear to want to carry that legacy forward, into a world they imagine will be utterly reorganized by superintelligence. “For a very long time, it’s been clear to me that this technological transformation is going to be the biggest thing that happens in our lives,” says Osika. 新一代人工智能慈善家似乎希望将这一遗产传承下去，进入一个他们想象中将被超级智能彻底重组的世界。奥西卡说：“很长一段时间以来，我一直很清楚，这场技术变革将是我们一生中发生的最重大的事情。”
However, this type of giving can come with trade-offs, and can be used by megadonors to discreetly advance their political interests, McGoey says. A recent study found that a reliance on philanthropic funding led the WHO to prioritize donors’ preferred causes at the expense of other urgent issues, like non-communicable diseases. 然而，麦戈伊表示，这种捐赠方式可能会带来权衡，并可能被超级捐赠者用来谨慎地推进他们的政治利益。最近的一项研究发现，对慈善资金的依赖导致世界卫生组织优先考虑捐赠者偏好的事业，而牺牲了其他紧迫问题，如非传染性疾病。