A few people have mentioned retroactive public goods funding. I’d suggest broadening the scope a bit:
Better funding models for altruistic projects
Effective Altruism, Research That Will Help Us Improve
Market-oriented funding models are often a poor fit for altruistic projects due to the free-rider problem. On the other hand, traditional philanthropy is limited by available funding and uncertainty about how to best allocate it. Various mechanisms have been proposed to address these problems, including certificates of impact, mutual matching, quadratic funding, and others. We’d like to support work in this vein to (a) design new funding models, (b) evaluate them in small experiments, and/or (c) implement them at scale.
Echoing oh54321′s comment: personal fit really matters, and luckily, the field you’re already interested in provides many opportunities to do good! If you don’t want to turn your back to biology, you don’t have to.
With that said, if you’re looking for recommendations about AI...
There are a couple of videos from the YouTube channel 3blue1brown that do a good job of explaining the basics of deep learning.
In terms of current research, there’s been some pretty fascinating (and biology-inspired!) work on interpretability. Two articles I’d recommend are Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits which lays out some high-level ideas, and Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks which reports findings from a real-world model.