At MIT, a continued dedication to understanding intelligence | MIT Information

The MIT Siegel Household Quest for Intelligence (SQI), a analysis unit within the MIT Schwarzman Faculty of Computing, brings collectively researchers from throughout MIT who mix their various experience to know intelligence via tightly coupled scientific inquiry and rigorous engineering. These researchers interact in collaborative efforts spanning science, engineering, the humanities, and extra. 

SQI seeks to understand how brains produce intelligence and the way it may be replicated in synthetic methods to handle real-world issues that exceed the capabilities of present synthetic intelligence applied sciences.

“In SQI, we’re finding out intelligence scientifically and generically, within the hope that by finding out neuroscience and habits in people and animals, and in addition finding out what we are able to construct as clever engineering artifacts, we’ll have the ability to perceive the basic underlying rules of intelligence,” says Leslie Pack Kaelbling, SQI director of analysis and the Panasonic Professor within the MIT Division of Electrical Engineering and Pc Science.

“We in SQI consider that understanding human intelligence is likely one of the best open questions in science — proper up there with the origin of the universe and our place in it, and the origin of life. The query of human intelligence has two elements: the way it works, and the place it comes from. If we perceive these, we are going to see payoffs effectively past our present imaginings,” says Jim DiCarlo, SQI director and the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience within the MIT Division of Mind and Cognitive Sciences.

Exploring the good mysteries of the thoughts

The MIT Siegel Household Quest for Intelligence was not too long ago renamed in recognition of a significant reward from the Siegel Family Endowment that’s enabling additional development in SQI’s research and actions.

SQI’s efforts are organized round missions — long-term, collaborative tasks rooted in foundational questions on intelligence and supported by platforms — methods, and software program that allow new analysis and create benchmarking and testing interfaces. 

“Ours is the one unit at MIT devoted to constructing a scientific understanding of intelligence whereas working with researchers throughout the whole Institute,” DiCarlo says. “There was exceptional progress in AI over the previous decade, however I consider the following decade will deliver even larger advances in our understanding of human intelligence — advances that can reshape what we name AI. By supporting us, David Siegel, the Siegel Household Endowment, and our different donors are demonstrating their confidence in our strategy.”

A legacy of interdisciplinary assist

In 2011, David Siegel SM ’86, PhD ’91 based the Siegel Household Endowment (SFE) to assist organizations working on the intersections of studying, workforce, and infrastructure. SFE funds organizations addressing society’s most crucial challenges whereas supporting modern civic and group leaders, social entrepreneurs, researchers, and others driving this work ahead. Siegel is a pc scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Whereas in graduate college at MIT’s Synthetic Intelligence Lab, he labored on robotics within the group of Tomás Lozano-Pérez — at the moment the College of Engineering Professor of Educating Excellence — specializing in sensing and greedy. Later, he co-founded Two Sigma with the idea that modern know-how, AI, and knowledge science might assist uncover worth on this planet’s knowledge. As we speak, Two Sigma drives transformation throughout the monetary providers trade in funding administration, enterprise capital, non-public fairness, and actual property.

Siegel explains, “The human mind could very effectively be essentially the most complicated bodily system within the universe, but most individuals have not proven a lot curiosity in the way it works. Individuals take the thoughts without any consideration, but marvel a lot about different scientific mysteries, such because the origin of the universe. My fascination with the mind and its intersection with synthetic intelligence stems from this. I don’t care whether or not there are business purposes for this quest; as a substitute, we must always pursue analysis like that carried out on the MIT Siegel Household Quest for Intelligence to advance our understanding of ourselves. As we uncover extra about human intelligence, I’m hopeful that we’ll lay the groundwork not just for advancing synthetic intelligence but in addition for extending our personal pondering.”

As a long-time champion of the Middle for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), a Nationwide Science Basis-funded collaborative interdisciplinary analysis thrust, and one of many first donors to the MIT Quest for Intelligence, David Siegel helped lay the inspiration for the analysis underway at present. In early 2024, he based Open Athena, a nonprofit that bridges the hole between educational analysis and the chopping fringe of AI. Open Athena equips universities with elite AI and knowledge engineering expertise to speed up breakthrough discoveries at scale. Siegel serves on the MIT Company Govt Committee, is vice-chair of the Scratch Basis, and is a member of the Cornell Tech Council. He additionally sits on the boards of Re:Construct Manufacturing, Khan Academy, NYC FIRST, and Carnegie Corridor.

A Catalyst for International Collaboration

MIT President Sally Kornbluth says, “Of all of the donors and supporters whose generosity fueled the Quest for Intelligence, nobody has been extra vital from the start than David Siegel. With out his longstanding dedication to CBMM and his assist for the Quest, this group may by no means have fashioned. There’s each motive to assume that David’s current reward, which renames the Quest for Intelligence and in addition helps the Schwarzman Faculty of Computing, might be much more highly effective in shaping the way forward for this initiative and of the sector itself.” She continues, “Fueled by beneficiant donors — significantly David Siegel’s transformative reward — SQI is poised to tackle an much more vital position.”

SQI scientists and engineers are presenting their work broadly, publishing papers, and creating new instruments and applied sciences which can be utilized in analysis establishments worldwide, as they interact with colleagues in disciplines throughout the Institute and in universities and establishments across the globe. DiCarlo explains, “We’re a part of the Schwarzman Faculty of Computing, on the nexus between the individuals enthusiastic about biology and varied types of intelligence and the individuals enthusiastic about AI. We’re working with companions at different universities, in nonprofits, and in trade — we will not do it alone.”

“Essentially, we’re not an AI effort. We’re a human intelligence effort utilizing the instruments of engineering,” DiCarlo says. “That offers us, amongst different issues, very helpful insights for human studying and well being, but in addition very helpful instruments for AI — together with AI that can simply work loads higher in a human world.” 

The whole SQI group of college, college students, and employees is worked up to face new challenges within the efforts to know the basics of intelligence.

New missions and subsequent horizons

SQI analysis is broadening: Mission principal investigators are integrating their efforts throughout areas of curiosity, rising their impression on the sector. Within the coming months, the group plans to launch a brand new Social Intelligence Mission.

“We have to concentrate on issues that mirror pure and synthetic intelligence — ensuring that we’re evaluating new fashions on duties that mirror what people and different pure intelligence can do,” says Nick Roy, SQI director of methods engineering and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. He predicts that SQI’s future analysis will depend on asking the fitting questions: “[While] we’re good at selecting duties that check our computational fashions, and we’re extraordinarily good at selecting duties that sort of align with what our fashions can already do, we have to get higher at selecting duties and benchmarks that additionally elicit one thing about pure intelligence,” he says.

On November 24, 2025, school, employees, college students, and supporters gathered at an occasion titled “The Next Horizon: Quest’s Future” to have a good time SQI’s subsequent chapter. The occasion consisted of a day of analysis updates, a panel dialogue, and a poster session on new and evolving analysis, and was attended by David Siegel, representatives from the Siegel Household Endowment, and varied members of the MIT Company. Recordings of the shows from the occasion can be found on SQI’s YouTube channel.