Billionaire Stephen Schwarzman’s mega-gift aims to develop ethically grounded AI leaders and accelerate America’s competitiveness.
By Maria Di Mento
Senior Editor, The Chronicle of Philanthropy
In 2018, ChatGPT was four years away and artificial intelligence was a wonky concern for tech and policy thinkers. But thanks to what billionaire financier Stephen Schwarzman saw on business trips to China, he was already worried about Chinese dominance of the technology and wanted to increase American competitiveness. He was also concerned about the potentially disastrous impact on the U.S. work force, economy, and national security. That year he gave the Massachusetts Institute of Technology $350 million to develop campuswide interdisciplinary programs to help its students better understand AI’s impact on people’s lives.
The goal: to responsibly harness the power of AI by shaping a more ethical and thoughtful generation of AI leaders who will help U.S. companies dominate the field.
“The wonderful parts of the technology will probably turn out to be more wonderful than people imagined,” Schwarzman told the Chronicle. “But on the negative side, we can’t just let things happen because the technology would be too powerful to suffer the consequences of that.”
In the world of AI, that gift was a lifetime ago. While MIT has been getting its program underway, AI products have been rolled out to consumers, and nearly 60 percent of Americans believe AI poses a high risk to society, according to a Pew Research Center study. Fears about job losses are growing.
Schwarzman’s donation launched MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing and was the lead gift toward the college’s goal, now completed, to raise $1 billion to establish the college and to integrate programs in computer science, artificial intelligence, and related fields across MIT’s academic departments. New interdisciplinary programs have been created to prepare students for an AI-saturated world and help them understand the social and ethical implications of digital technologies. The university also hopes to encourage collaboration between government and industry to ensure new technologies are deployed in more socially responsible ways.
Read the full article at the Chronicle.
