M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1B

This sounds like a direct response to two things (mostly): 1) CMU establishing a &#x27;department&#x27; of AI (where MIT had merely an AI track within the CS program), and 2) Kai-Fu Lee&#x27;s recent book on the rise and inevitable domination by China of all things AI-related -- inviting a new &#x27;space race&#x27; between the superpowers. (A &#x27;brain race&#x27;?)<p>Yet I can&#x27;t imagine why an entire &#x27;college&#x27; of AI is needed. AI simply isn&#x27;t a field that&#x27;s deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school. Each of this college&#x27;s AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely.<p>Maybe this was the only way to ensure the gift of all $350 million. Or to build <i>multiple</i> new buildings...

I wish top-rated institutions stopped pretending &quot;AI&quot; means &quot;the last 6 years in statistical machine learning&quot;.<p>But I guess we all have our pet peeves, eh?

They could call it the MIT Computer Science &amp; Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

I have been and continue to remain very skeptical about all this hoopla about AI.<p>Five years ago, I thought the hoopla about AI is just a fashion and it&#x27;s all going to quickly pass.<p>Two years ago, I thought it&#x27;s a bubble that will eventually burst.<p>At this point, I&#x27;m wondering whether what&#x27;s happening is pure re-branding where we&#x27;ll stop using the term CS and instead use the term AI.<p>If I think of AI as CS, I&#x27;m ok with it although I don&#x27;t think graphics, comp. architecture, networking, and OS are AI. But if the rest of the world wants to call them AI, then let them.

College of Statistics and Nonlinear Function Approximation

I found the cross-discipline focus on the staff interesting:<p>&gt; The goal of the college, said L. Rafael Reif, the president of M.I.T., is to “educate the bilinguals of the future.” He defines bilinguals as people in fields like biology, chemistry, politics, history and linguistics who are also skilled in the techniques of modern computing that can be applied to them.<p>&gt; [...]<p>&gt; Traditionally, departments hold sway in hiring and tenure decisions at universities. So, for example, a researcher who applied A.I.-based text analysis tools in a field like history might be regarded as too much a computer scientist by the humanities department and not sufficiently technical by the computer science department.<p>They&#x27;re not just talking about streamlining &quot;learn these statistical models&quot; but also expanding humanities studies.<p>The obvious wins from this that I see are:<p>a) more applications of A.I. in areas that C.S. students are less interested in.<p>b) more people who are knowledgeable about A.I. outside of C.S.

Aren&#x27;t they jumping the gun, here? We&#x27;ll need a general AI that can graduate high school first.~<p>I&#x27;m not sure why they need an entirely new college. Doesn&#x27;t that just increase administrative overhead out of proportion to any perceivable benefit?

Am I the only one who read the title and was not sure if M.I.T was creating an AI college for students or for AI algorithms to earn accreditation?

&gt; The college, Ms. Nobles said, offers the possibility of a renewal for humanities studies at M.I.T., where students flock to computer science and engineering.<p>Do MIT students major in humanities subjects, or is the department&#x27;s purpose to make engineering students well-rounded through taking electives in their department?

I&#x27;m quite skeptical of the interdisciplinary approach. We already know that it&#x27;s possible to create useful neural networks without any &quot;preprogramming&quot;, i.e., creating AlphaGo zero without beginning with any knowledge of Go. An interdisciplinary approach seems backward in that it premises that we need to know something about the problem before we can build the tools to find the solution. That&#x27;s increasingly not the case, and I think what will ultimately happen at this College is that CS researchers will wall themselves off from the rest, who will just slow them down. If you want to bring AI to other fields, educate the people in those fields or hire an ML engineer.

$1 billion is slightly less than a third of MIT&#x27;s annual operating expenditures.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.mit.edu&#x2F;facts&#x2F;financial.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.mit.edu&#x2F;facts&#x2F;financial.html</a><p>This boondoggle will have everyone from department heads and tenured professors to Boston building contractors climbing over each other to get to the feeding trough. In the end the billion will be soaked up like a sponge, everyone will be looking around saying &quot;What happened?&quot;, and little will show as a result of the expenditure.<p>Better to have selectively (and quietly) researched and invested in more specific efforts. But yeah, it&#x27;s hard to find an easy way to spend a billion dollars.

I&#x27;m not sure how I feel about this.<p>On the one hand I think its great that the humanities are getting increased support in general, and a sort of &quot;upgrade&quot; with more focus on integrating more statistical and analysis techniques &#x2F; technologies.<p>But on the downside this seems to only fuel the hype bubble around &quot;AI&quot;. I&#x27;d rather see existing departments and courses get updated with the technologies and techniques they are trying to integrate rather than a new &quot;College of AI&quot;.

are we living in the fallout 4 timeline?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fallout.wikia.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Institute" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fallout.wikia.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Institute</a>

ever searched for a job in AI? They ALL (at least in Europe) want senior developers with 5-8 years experience in all sort of areas and no junior AI devs. Anybody is offering AI jobs (international) for people who got out of college and specialized in that? Looking for my brother, he is specialized in AI and looking for months for an AI job in Germany.

How old is the cut off age for enrollment?

I&#x27;m conflicted on this. On one hand, academic donations are always great. On the other hand, Stephen Schwarzman has a record of giving large donations in exchange for naming rights. He gave $150 million to Yale to renovate the main campus center, called &quot;Commons,&quot; into the &quot;Schwarzman Center.&quot; He gave $25 million to his high school in exchange for naming rights bordering on autocracy, including having his portrait appear &quot;prominently&quot; throughout the school. These conditions were scaled back after they were made public, previously kept private as a condition of the donation. (source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;amphtml&#x2F;news&#x2F;answer-sheet&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;12&#x2F;billionaire-offered-25-million-to-high-school-alma-mater-what-he-wanted-in-return-was-too-much-for-the-district&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;amphtml&#x2F;news&#x2F;answer-sheet&#x2F;wp&#x2F;...</a>) He made a scholarship program called the &quot;Schwarzman Scholars&quot; modeled after the Rhodes. Now, MIT.<p>Look, don&#x27;t get me wrong. I think donations to academic institutions are fantastic and he should be lauded for his generous giving. However I think it is worthwhile as a society for us to inspect these kind of actions a bit more critically. In my view, Schwarzman, who has no prior record of public interest, giving, or service prior to the last 10 years, is embarking on an aggressive campaign to formulate a positive legacy of his name with his money before he dies. It is artificial, transparent, and revisionist. 100 years from now, people won&#x27;t remember Schwarzman for being a Trump supporter&#x2F;friend&#x2F;advisor and a wealthy Republican. As he has made certain with these donations, Schwarzman will be remembered as a benevolent philanthropist.<p>He has done an extremely clever thing. Even I can&#x27;t deny that he has done a wonderful thing by giving away so much money. So who can justifiably criticize the intent behind his actions? No one, really.<p>To me, Schwarzman&#x27;s donations reveal just how much of culture and history is straight up bought and paid for. If you have enough money, no matter how you actually live your life and what you do, you can just pay the right people or institutions, and you will be forever remembered as a good person. Remember that.

Can I register a trademark for “University of Gradient Descent”? Something tells me it will be worth a ton of money in a few years.

Is there any reason not to link to the MIT news itself?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2018&#x2F;mit-reshapes-itself-stephen-schwarzman-college-of-computing-1015" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2018&#x2F;mit-reshapes-itself-stephen-schwar...</a><p>Why link to the nytimes when you can link to the actual source?

No!

Would be cool if they had an online&#x2F;remote version of it and offered M.S. world-wide. Hey MIT, you up for some large-scale experiments in humanities?

The association with Schwarzman tarnishes my perception of MIT.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;noticingnewyork.blogspot.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;plutocratic-class-warrior-stephen.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;noticingnewyork.blogspot.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;plutocratic-clas...</a>

School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh. O.G in A.I., I&#x27;m biased as I graduated from there. Awesome awesome place to study A.I.