About AI2050

AI2050 is an initiative at Schmidt Futures grounded in the following motivating question:

It’s 2050. AI has turned out to be hugely beneficial to society. What happened? What are the most important problems we solved and the opportunities and possibilities we realized to ensure this outcome?

The initiative aims to answer this question primarily by making awards to support work conducted by individuals from across the globe and at various stages in their careers. Eric and Wendy Schmidt have committed $125 million over five years to the initiative; Eric Schmidt and James Manyika are co-chairs of the initiative.

Drawing on previous work and numerous conversations with other experts, the initiative has developed a working list of the hard problems for AI2050. This list is aimed at realizing the opportunity for society from AI as well as addressing the risks and challenges that could result from the technology, and it will guide the initiative’s investments.

Awards

AI2050 will issue awards to support work conducted by researchers. These awards will primarily aim to enable and encourage bold and ambitious work, often multi-disciplinary, that is typically hard to fund but socially beneficial. Awards will be given for exceptional work tackling one or multiple items from a working list of hard problems.

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Artifacts

AI2050 will share research findings from our Fellows. Work supported by AI2050 will be open-source and published, in order that society can benefit from this important work. This includes research from the award recipient network, from our collaborations with leading groups, and from the initiative itself.

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Community

AI2050 Fellows will come from around the globe. Through this initiative, we will plan to support talented researchers at various stages of their careers, to help encourage the next generation of researchers to focus on the hard problems in AI. AI2050 Fellows, the broader AI community, and other stakeholders will regularly convene to discuss and advance the work of the initiative.

Our Founders and Co-Chairs
Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt FOUNDER and AI2050 Co-chair

Eric Schmidt is an accomplished technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He served as Google’s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman from 2001-2011 where he pioneered the company’s transformation from a Silicon Valley startup to a global leader in technology. Eric oversaw the company’s technical and business strategies alongside founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a strong culture of innovation.

Additionally, from 2018-2020, Eric served as the Technical...

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Wendy Schmidt
Wendy Schmidt Founder

Wendy Schmidt is a philanthropist and investor who has spent the past 14 years creating innovative non-profit organizations to address challenges facing communities around the world, working for clean, renewable energy, healthy food systems, healthy oceans and the protection of human rights. The critical interconnections between human activity, the land we live on and the ocean we depend upon are the central drivers of Wendy’s philanthropic work.

Wendy is president of The Schmidt Family Foundation, which she co-founded with her...

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James Manyika
James Manyika AI2050 Co-chair and Senior Advisor, 
Schmidt Futures

James is Google-Alphabet’s Senior Vice President for Technology & Society and a member of the CEO’s leadership team. He focuses on areas ranging from AI, computing infrastructure, to the future of work, the digital economy and sustainability that have potential for broad impact on society.

He is Senior Partner emeritus of McKinsey & Company, where he also served on its board, and is Chair and director emeritus of the McKinsey Global Institute. At Mckinsey, he advised the chief executives of...

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Our Team
Mark Greaves
Mark Greaves Executive Director

Mark Greaves is the Executive Director, AI2050. An initiative of Schmidt Futures, AI2050 supports exceptional people working on key opportunities and hard problems that are critical to get right for society to benefit from AI.

Prior to joining Schmidt Futures, Mark was a senior leader in AI and data analytics within the National Security Directorate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he created and managed large research programs in AI on behalf of the US Government. Prior to this, Mark...

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Chetan Patel
Chetan Patel Associate

Chetan Patel is an Associate on the AI2050 program at Schmidt Futures.

Prior to Schmidt Futures, Chetan was a research fellow at MIT studying topics at the intersection of market design, labor economics, and econometrics. Before MIT, Chetan was a strategy consultant at EY-Parthenon serving philanthropic foundations, public school districts, and private equity clients.

Chetan received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from Williams College.

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Maya Moretta
Maya Moretta Program Delivery Specialist

Maya Moretta is a program delivery specialist at Schmidt Futures. Through her work, she supports program teams and awardees as they progress through the entire award life cycle, from proposal submission to final evaluation.

Prior to joining Schmidt Futures, Maya developed her passion for progressive and equity-focused grant making while designing and launching a progressive, equity-focused general operating support grant program at Maryland Humanities in Baltimore.

Maya holds a B.A. in History and African-American Studies from Georgetown University, where she...

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Mike Belinsky
Mike Belinsky Advisor

Mike Belinsky is a Director of Talent Ventures at Schmidt Futures, where he helps develop the Talent Ventures portfolio, supports current programs on strategy and execution, and helps design and launch new programs.

Prior to Schmidt Futures, Mike was a principal at The Bridgespan Group, where he led teams that addressed complex strategy and execution challenges for foundations, impact investors, and nonprofits. At Bridgespan, Mike also helped build the impact investing practice.

Mike also co-founded Instiglio, a social enterprise that...

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About 
Schmidt Futures

Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative, founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, that finds exceptional people and helps them do more for others together. We knit talent into networks, bet on the most promising ideas through diverse forms of competition and support, and equip people to scale through partners and modern tools. To realize this vision, Schmidt Futures uses a broad set of tools — including gifts, grants, investments, and startup activity — for charitable, educational, and commercial efforts with a public purpose. Our initiative brings together the efforts of various charitable and non-charitable entities to improve our potential impact by making diverse types of capital available to the efforts we support.

Futures Action Network, LLC, which operates Schmidt Futures, is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer that proudly pursues and hires a diverse workforce. We do not make hiring or employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion or religious belief, ethnic or national origin, nationality, sex, gender, gender-identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, military or veteran status, or any other basis protected by applicable local, state, or federal laws or prohibited by Company policy. We strive for a healthy and safe workplace and strictly prohibit harassment of any kind.