Ahead of Wednesday’s AI-focused private congressional meeting with tech giants, Google this morning announced a latest initiative aimed toward supporting researchers and public policy solutions around AI with the debut of the Digital Futures Project. As a part of the trouble, Google’s charitable arm Google.org is establishing a $20 million fund that can provide grants to think tanks and academic institutions developing AI expertise.

Explains Google.org director Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, “AI has the potential to make our lives easier and address a few of society’s most complex challenges — like stopping disease, making cities work higher, and predicting natural disasters. But it surely also raises questions on fairness, bias, misinformation, security, and the longer term of labor.”

The tech giant says it goals to fund independent thinkers who’re looking into topics like how AI will impact global security or how it could possibly be used to reinforce the safety of institutions and enterprises; how AI will impact labor and the way we will transition the workforce to the AI jobs of the longer term; how governments can use AI to spice up productivity and economic growth; and what sorts of governance structure and cross-industry efforts can best promote responsible AI innovation.

The inaugural grantees of the Digital Futures Fund include the Aspen Institute, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Center for a Latest American Security, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Institute for Security and Technology, Leadership Conference Education Fund, MIT Work of the Future, R Street Institute and SeedAI.

Google says that the fund will support organizations all over the world, not only within the U.S., and it’ll have more to share on that front soon.

“Responsible AI” has been a subject of increased interest as AI advances have picked up speed. Earlier this 12 months, 4 of the highest players in AI, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic in addition to Google, announced a latest industry body, the Frontier Model Forum, with the aim of ensuring the “protected and responsible developer of AI models. President Biden also met with seven AI firms on the White House to conform to voluntary safeguards around AI. Beyond the U.S., Europe has also been taking steps toward agreeing on an AI rulebook.

Later this week, the U.S. Congress will turn its attention to AI in a closed-door meeting with all 100 senators who will hear from Elon Musk, who recently announced a latest AI organization, xAI, together with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other tech leaders, including the CEOs of IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia and Palantir.

Google, meanwhile, had published its own set of AI principles in 2018 and continues to publish AI research. Nevertheless, the corporate had grown cautious around the event and release of AI technologies, resulting in researcher departures and the chance for Microsoft and OpenAI to take the lead with ChatGPT and a partnership that integrated OpenAI technologies into Bing and other Microsoft products.

With a spotlight now on collaboration, Google today said getting AI right will take a couple of company.

“We hope the Digital Futures Project and this fund will support many others across academia and civil society to advance independent research on AI that helps this transformational technology profit everyone,” Gosselink said.