The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) is pleased to announce its membership of the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI), a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to collaboration and open dialogue on the opportunities and challenges of AI, founded by Amazon, Apple, Google/DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft.

LCFI’s Executive Director, Dr Stephen Cave, said:

“With AI advancing rapidly, we need a broad coalition to manage its impact for the good of all. The Partnership on AI is a much-needed and timely development, bringing together the leading companies driving the technology, and an increasingly wide range of other groups, including non-profit and academic institutions, such as our Centre based at the University of Cambridge.

At LCFI, we strongly share the Partnership’s mission to ensure that AI develops in a way that is safe, responsible and fair. We are therefore delighted to be joining the Partnership on AI, alongside other organisations including UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, and our partners in Oxford, the Future of Humanity Institute. We hope that being a member will provide us with new allies and opportunities in what is likely to be one of the great challenges of the 21st century, while we hope to be able to contribute the insight and analysis of our highly interdisciplinary team.”

LCFI is a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, Imperial College London and the University of California at Berkeley and is funded by an unprecedented £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust. Its mission is to create the interdisciplinary community that will be needed to make the AI revolution go as well as possible for humanity. At the Centre’s launch in Cambridge last October, Professor Stephen Hawking said “The rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which. The research done by this centre will be crucial to the future of our civilisation and of our species.”

The Partnership on AI's goals are to study and formulate best practices on the development, testing, and fielding of AI technologies, advancing the public’s understanding of AI, to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society and identify and foster aspirational efforts in AI for socially beneficial purposes. The Partnership on AI was actively designed to bring together a diverse range of voices from for-profit and non-profit, all of whom share the belief in the tenets, and are committed to collaboration and open dialogue on the many opportunities and rising challenges around AI. 

The Partnership on AI will be launching a set of activities around the challenges and opportunities described in the core thematic pillars.

The eight new for-profit Partners are eBay, Intel, McKinsey & Company, Salesforce, SAP, Sony, and Zalando, along with start-up Cogitai.

The fourteen non-profit Partners are the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI Forum of New Zealand, Centre for Democracy & Technology, Centre for Internet and Society – India, Data & Society Research Institute, Digital Asia Hub, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Future of Humanity Institute, Future of Privacy Forum, Human Rights Watch, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, UNICEF, Upturn, and the XPRIZE Foundation

Find out more about the Partnership on AI. 

A full list of partners can be found here.

For more information, please contact our Centre Administrator, Susan Gowans on skg41@cam.ac.uk or +44 (0)1223 760488