The French government is set to announce the creation of a new foundation dedicated to the creation of AI “public goods” at the AI Action Summit in Paris.
Called Current AI, the organization will be established Tuesday with an initial endowment of $400 million from the French government, the AI Collaborative—which is part of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropy, the Omidyar Network—and a coalition of other countries, technology companies, and philanthropic organizations. The new foundation says its goal is to eventually raise $2.5 billion over five years. It will make grants to fund work that supports public interest projects around AI.
Companies backing the foundation include Google and Salesforce as “core partners,” and Hugging Face, Instacart, AI startup Sakana AI and others as “supporters,” suggesting they have committed less money to the project.
Martin Tisné, the CEO of the AI Collaborative and France’s special envoy for public interest AI at the AI Action Summit, told Fortune he envisions many of these projects being around the creation of new public datasets that can be used to build AI models that serve the public interest.
He says the bottleneck for the creation of public goods in AI is not access to computing power, but rather data. Much of the data people would want to create models, to do things like help cure cancer or help people use AI to better analyze government policies, are not found on the internet. In many cases, governments have these data sets, but they are not easily accessible by the public. In other cases, governments are in a position to create high-value datasets that the private sector cannot create, although Tisne noted that these would have to be created and made available in “a secure and privacy-preserving way.”
