Some of the biggest names in technology and AI are launching new organizations with ambitious plans to help employees navigate the transition to AI.
OpenAI Foundation, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft are all “anchor partners” of Raise US. Raise US is a new nonprofit aiming to raise $1 billion to build a national platform to advise governors on how best to prepare their workforces for AI disruption. The group says it has already raised $500 million. (The OpenAI Foundation is a nonprofit organization created as part of OpenAI’s restructuring and holds $100 billion in equity in the for-profit arm of OpenAI.)
“America has a technology strategy to lead the global AI race. America still doesn’t have a talent strategy, and without a talent strategy we won’t be able to lead,” former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who heads the group, said in a statement announcing the initiative.
Raise US’s initial partners are Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland and Utah, which are evenly split between states ruled by Republican and Democratic governors.
“By working directly with state governments to pilot and scale new workforce models, we can move faster and reach more people than we could alone,” David Zapolsky, Amazon’s chief global affairs and legal officer, said in a post explaining the partnership.
In Arkansas, the group is working with Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders to launch “an AI-powered career navigation platform called Arkansas Launch that connects students and job seekers with personalized learning and employer-relevant career pathways.”
In Maryland, Raise US is working with Gov. Wes Moore to expand the number of years of work for recent high school graduates in fields such as health care and education.
Of the first group, Utah may be one of the most interesting. The state has found itself at the center of a backlash against building AI data centers. Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary has cut his planned data center by nearly half after intense public backlash and political pressure.
The group said more states will join in the coming months. Rays US said elsewhere that it wants to work on “real-world pilots” of policies such as “short-time compensation and wage insurance.”
Raimondo, who served as governor of Rhode Island before joining the Biden administration, is leading the effort with former Indiana governor Eric Holcomb. Greylock partner David Sze is one of four people who will serve on the organization’s board of directors.
In addition to the AI partners, Raise US’s advisory board includes experts in American business, politics, labor, philanthropy, and economics, including Laurene Powell Jobs, Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, Bank of America Co-President Jim DeMare, former IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, AFL-CIO President Liz Schuller, and prominent economist Raj Chetty.
There is intense debate about the extent to which AI will disrupt the labor market. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has bluntly warned that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs over the next one to five years.
AI and technology CEOs have recently sought to distance themselves from the employment “apocalypse” debate over concerns that this rhetoric is fueling AI’s decline in popularity in the United States. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went so far as to say, “I’m glad we were wrong on this.”
“I would have thought that the impact of cutting white-collar entry-level jobs by now would be greater than what is actually happening,” Mr Altman said at an event hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in May.