The MIT Siegel Household Quest for Intelligence (SQI), a analysis unit within the MIT Schwarzman School of Computing, brings collectively researchers from throughout MIT who mix their numerous experience to grasp intelligence by way of tightly coupled scientific inquiry and rigorous engineering. These researchers interact in collaborative efforts spanning science, engineering, the humanities, and extra.
SQI seeks to grasp how brains produce intelligence and the way it may be replicated in synthetic programs to handle real-world issues that exceed the capabilities of present synthetic intelligence applied sciences.
“In SQI, we’re learning intelligence scientifically and generically, within the hope that by learning neuroscience and conduct in people and animals, and likewise learning what we will construct as clever engineering artifacts, we’ll be capable to perceive the elemental underlying ideas of intelligence,” says Leslie Pack Kaelbling, SQI director of analysis and the Panasonic Professor within the MIT Division of Electrical Engineering and Laptop Science.
“We in SQI imagine that understanding human intelligence is among the biggest 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 components: the way it works, and the place it comes from. If we perceive these, we are going to see payoffs nicely 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 just lately renamed in recognition of a significant reward from the Siegel Family Endowment that’s enabling additional progress 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 — programs, 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 all the Institute,” DiCarlo says. “There was exceptional progress in AI over the previous decade, however I imagine the subsequent decade will carry even better 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 help
In 2011, David Siegel SM ’86, PhD ’91 based the Siegel Household Endowment (SFE) to help organizations working on the intersections of studying, workforce, and infrastructure. SFE funds organizations addressing society’s most important 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 — presently the College of Engineering Professor of Educating Excellence — specializing in sensing and greedy. Later, he co-founded Two Sigma with the assumption that modern know-how, AI, and knowledge science might assist uncover worth on the earth’s knowledge. At this time, Two Sigma drives transformation throughout the monetary companies business in funding administration, enterprise capital, personal fairness, and actual property.
Siegel explains, “The human mind could very nicely be essentially the most advanced bodily system within the universe, but most individuals have not proven a lot curiosity in the way it works. Folks take the thoughts as a right, but surprise 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 functions for this quest; as a substitute, we must always pursue analysis like that completed 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 considering.”
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 in the present day. In early 2024, he based Open Athena, a nonprofit that bridges the hole between tutorial analysis and the reducing 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 help for the Quest, this group may by no means have shaped. There’s each motive to suppose that David’s latest reward, which renames the Quest for Intelligence and likewise helps the Schwarzman School of Computing, might be much more highly effective in shaping the way forward for this initiative and of the sphere itself.” She continues, “Fueled by beneficiant donors — notably David Siegel’s transformative reward — SQI is poised to tackle an much more vital function.”
SQI scientists and engineers are presenting their work broadly, publishing papers, and growing new instruments and applied sciences which might 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 School of Computing, on the nexus between the individuals occupied with biology and varied types of intelligence and the individuals occupied with AI. We’re working with companions at different universities, in nonprofits, and in business — 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 lots higher in a human world.”
The whole SQI group of college, college students, and employees is happy to face new challenges within the efforts to grasp 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 influence on the sphere. 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 programs engineering and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. He predicts that SQI’s future analysis will depend on asking the appropriate questions: “[While] we’re good at selecting duties that take a look at our computational fashions, and we’re extraordinarily good at selecting duties that type 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 fun 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 displays from the occasion can be found on SQI’s YouTube channel.
