Striking a Chord
The AI-for-good ideas I can't get out of my head.
Prelude
You may know me as the AI for Humanity guy. But long before Fast Forward, I was playing a different tune as the co-founder of SpotDJ. Back when iTunes ruled our screens, I built a platform for people to DJ their music libraries — rating songs, sharing commentary, curating the perfect playlist.
These days, my beat is a little different, but what hasn’t changed is my instinct to curate and share what resonates. So consider this a return to form: I’m putting together a mixtape, except this time the tracks are my favorite quotes from Fund.AI.
Over 100 philanthropic leaders gathered in San Francisco this October for the second annual convening hosted by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and Fast Forward. For two days, the air buzzed with genuine momentum. Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and Former Vice President Al Gore, co-founder of Climate TRACE, took the stage. So did Maggie Johnson, Global Head of Google.org, and leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.
Between the talks, workshops, and demos, certain ideas lodged themselves in our brains and refused to leave. If these ideas are going to live rent-free in my head, they’re going to have to take up space in yours too.
Here’s your Fund.AI mixtape — the hits that capture what this moment in AI philanthropy feels like.
Track #1
“To have machines do what humans can already do is not nearly as interesting as having them do what we could never do.“ - Baratunde Thurston
Writer and commentator Baratunde Thurston really underscored what I’m most excited about for AI and social impact. AI-powered nonprofits are solving some of our biggest problems — problems that feel impossible to solve precisely because, until now, they might have been.
We heard this firsthand during the Lightning Learn session. Lemontree‘s Kasumi Quinlan shared how they’re reaching a scale that would be impossible otherwise. To get food to people who need it, their AI considers requirements, travel preferences, and real-time reviews to make recommendations the way a social worker would — but for nearly 20K households daily. And it’s powered by just two engineers and the same frontline staff. It frees up support specialists to offer the genuine warmth and empathy this work demands, while serving more families than any traditional model could reach.
Materiom‘s Liz Corbin and Alysia Garmulewicz showed us how they’re compressing two decades of material science trial-and-error into two years. Their AI co-inventor helps companies develop bio-based materials: plastics made from seaweed, food waste, and mushrooms that compost back into the soil. AI is helping them fast forward the future we need.
Beyond the nonprofit space, we’re seeing AI achieve what seemed impossible. Just last month, C2S-Scale generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior, and researchers confirmed its prediction with experimental validation in living cells. This isn’t about replacing what humans can do. It’s about expanding what humanity can achieve.
Track #2
“We all face the same choice over and over again, and it’s between the hard right and the easy wrong.” - Al Gore
Al Gore wasn’t there to sugarcoat the climate crisis. He was there to talk about what happens when you give people the data they need to make the hard right choice.
Climate TRACE, the coalition Gore co-founded, uses satellites, AI, and remote sensing to track emissions from over 660M individual sources worldwide — not just power plants, but also ships, planes, landfills, and rice fields. Gore walked us through “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile stretch of Louisiana where some communities face 50 times the cancer risk. Climate TRACE can show you the plumes using visualizations that connect the dots between emissions and human health in ways raw numbers never could. When people can see the problem this clearly, they’re motivated to act.
And action is happening. Last year, 93% of all new electricity generation installed worldwide was renewable. This year, renewables overtook coal as the world’s biggest source of electricity. Gore reminded us that it’s going to be hard to accelerate this transition away from fossil fuels, but hard is not the same as impossible.
For funders, the question becomes: Are we backing the organizations that make it impossible to look away and easier to take action?
Track #3
“There’s absolutely misuse of these technologies. But there’s also missed use.” - Shannon Farley
In her conversation with Maggie Johnson, my co-founder Shannon hit on the notion that we spend a lot of time worrying about AI being misused — and we should. But what about all the ways we’re missing the use entirely?
If funders can’t experiment with these technologies, how can we expect to support the communities we care about in doing the same? It’s hard to evaluate an AI proposal or understand what responsible AI looks like if you’ve never prompted a model.
This isn’t about funders becoming AI experts overnight. It’s about getting comfortable with experimentation: trying tools, learning what works. The organizations we fund are already doing this messy work of innovation. It’s time we did it alongside them.
Quick Bytes
Other Sector Stories
Earth Species Project is unlocking a whole new mixtape of sounds: animal chatter. On the Possible podcast, Aza Raskin shared how AI is being used to decode the languages of whales, elephants, and crows — revealing cultures, names, and even fashion fads among species.
Last month, I attended The Curve, a gathering of 350 AI insiders in Berkeley. It would be difficult to sum up three days of intense conversation in a single blurb. Fortunately, Eli Pariser did an excellent job capturing what he saw. Worth the read if you want to understand where this is all headed. What I heard and the ideas it sparked will make their way into this newsletter in the coming months.
What happens when you combine James Baldwin’s wisdom with AI and a vintage typewriter? In partnership with the Baldwin estate, Kinfolk created an installation that lets visitors ask life’s big questions and guides them to Baldwin’s actual words through an AI-powered typewriter experience. The New York Times explores Kinfolk’s exhibition and highlights their mission to use AI to make the work of other writers and artists of color equally accessible.
Fast Forward’s AI for Humanity Report continues to spark conversation. A few highlights: the report was featured in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Philanthropy News Digest, and Candid; the Disruptors for GOOD podcast; and the Humanitarian AI Today podcast.
APN Opportunities and Funding News
Humanity AI committed $500M to build a people-centered future for AI. The coalition is made up of the Doris Duke Foundation, Ford Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Kapor Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Omidyar Network, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and Siegel Family Endowment.
The WIN AI Challenge will award up to eight solutions at $2.5M or $5M each to help women thrive and build a better workplace for all.
data.org and Zoom launched The Activate AI: Economic Opportunity Challenge, a global call for applications of AI to empower people and communities to unlock economic opportunity for a resilient future.
Bezos Earth Fund awarded $30M for AI Grand Challenge for Climate and Nature.
Let’s Talk
I am living and breathing AI for humanity these days. If you are too, let’s talk!