As artificial intelligence (AI) permeates more and more aspects of our daily life, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is establishing a new organisation to address scientific problems and perhaps make advances in fields ranging from medication research to material sciences.
According to Semafor, a news website, Eric Schmidt has appointed Andrew White, a pioneer in the application of AI in chemistry, and Samuel Rodriques, the creator of the Applied Biotechnology Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, to lead the nonprofit project.
The project is similar to OpenAI, which was funded by Microsoft and created ChatGPT.
“Funding will come mostly from Schmidt’s personal wealth, but outside funds may be necessary given the ambition of the project,” the report claimed, the Semafor reported.
The reports stated that the project is currently in the planning stages, so specifics may change.
“With the advent of AI, science is about to become much more exciting — and in some ways unrecognisable. The reverberations of this shift will be felt far outside the lab; they will affect us all,” Eric Schmidt said in a recent article in MIT Technology Review titled ‘This is how AI will transform the way science gets done.’
He also co-founded Schmidt Futures, with his wife Wendy, a charitable foundation that supports scientific projects with the potential to have a significant impact.
According to the report, the pair have contributed money to a number of other AI-related initiatives, including the nonprofit AI2050 and the AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme.
Meanwhile, recently in an interview with CNBC, Eric Schmidt raised concerns about the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and misinformation on the upcoming 2024 elections in the US.
He believes that the accessibility of advanced AI tools will contribute to widespread misinformation during the election period.
He also stated that social media platforms are currently not effectively protecting users from false information generated by AI.