OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are all planning to go public in coming months, which will create a new crop of billionaires and centi-millionaires—and likely Earth’s first trillionaire. Here’s how Nan Ransohoff put it in a Substack post that’s been making the rounds:
Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26 percent of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80 percent of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history.
She does some back-of-the-envelope math and comes up with an estimate of $50 billion in new philanthropic spending every year. This is six times the annual spending of the Gates Foundation.
My question is how education reformers can convince the new philanthropists to invest in educational improvement. I worry that it may not be easy.
Note, for example, Ross Douthat’s off-hand comment in his New York Times column about this coming gusher of cash:
At its best, the infrastructure established by figures like Gates delivered effective efforts to reduce poverty and fight disease; at its worst, it threw money after fashionable political causes and education fads.
“Threw money after…education fads.” Harsh…but kinda fair?
Or consider what Nan thinks the newly minted zillionaires are going to care about, coming as they do from the world of AI:
Belief 1: AI is fundamentally reshaping civilization and we need to make sure that goes well. There are two major questions at hand: (1) How do we ensure we make it through the AI transition? And (2) if/once we do, how do we ensure humanity flourishes? The first is more downside-oriented, concerned with catastrophic or at least major risk (biosecurity, loss of control, etc.). The second—human flourishing—is more upside-oriented. Flourishing here is broader than the usual short list. It’s longevity and economic abundance, yes—but it also extends into aesthetics, civic life, moral imagination, relationships, and the cultural infrastructure that gives life meaning.
Belief 2: Speed matters. The next X years are critical. There’s tremendous concern especially around the group of risks driving question (1) described above. The importance of speed in mitigating these risks is critical if not existential.
Speed is not something that education, or education reform, is known for. After all, as Sam Altman said (defensively but also accurately) back in February, “It takes about 20 years of life—and all the food you consume during that time—before you become smart.” I’m a big believer in starting reform efforts early, especially in elementary school, but the payoff doesn’t come for a decade or more. Some of these folks will worry that we’ll all be replaced by AI overlords by then.
“Human flourishing,” on the other hand, is something that great schools can definitely contribute to. And it makes sense, especially for high schools and colleges, to worry deeply and urgently about helping graduates through the “AI transition,” both in terms of preparing for jobs that are unlikely to be replaced by bots and in developing the “moral imagination, relationships,” etc. that will allow them to flourish along the way.
But does that mean we need to transform secondary and postsecondary education entirely? Double down on the liberal arts? Lean into career and technical education in fields that will be hard to automate? Everyone has opinions (myself included), but nobody knows for sure.
And what about the meat-and-potatoes school reform agenda? Raising standards, expanding high-quality choices, supporting excellent teachers, spending resources more efficiently and effectively? How do we get the AI billionaires to care about all of that? Especially at a time when student achievement is in the toilet and the conventional wisdom is that “nothing works,” that past philanthropy has “thrown money after education fads” and has little to show for it? I don’t think that’s true. We made a huge amount of progress from the late 1990s till the early 2010s, thanks in part to philanthropy. And lots of things work—even according to stodgy scholars—including charter schools, pre-K, merit pay, and more. But in the competition for philanthropic funding, we are starting with some serious disadvantages.
Editor’s note: This was adapted from an article first published on Mike’s Substack, SCHOOLED.
