These AI Barons Are Ready to Give Away Their Fortunes
Wired · LC · trust 47/100
Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story 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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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 .
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?
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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