The Schmidt Sciences AI2050 program seeks to resolve pivotal technical, societal, and economic hurdles so that artificial intelligence serves the public good by mid-century. Selected faculty include Senior Fellow Sendhil Mullainathan alongside multiple assistant professors appointed as Early Career Fellows. As part of his fellowship research, Mullainathan will convert machine-identified patterns into testable scientific theories while establishing a specialized research center called The Bike Shop@MIT to develop human-centered algorithms.
Key points
The philanthropic initiative funds researchers addressing complex AI challenges to ensure…: The philanthropic initiative funds researchers addressing complex AI challenges to ensure beneficial societal impacts by 2050.
Honorees are pursuing diverse technical applications, spanning mathematical training foun…: Honorees are pursuing diverse technical applications, spanning mathematical training foundations, policy-making input tools, and intersections with biology.
Senior Fellow Sendhil Mullainathan will concentrate his fellowship on turning patterns de…: Senior Fellow Sendhil Mullainathan will concentrate his fellowship on turning patterns detected by artificial intelligence into testable scientific theories.
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Five MIT faculty members and two additional alumni were recently named to the 2026 cohort of AI2050 Fellows. The honor is announced annually by Schmidt Sciences, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s philanthropic initiative that aims to accelerate scientific innovation.
Conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative aimed at helping to solve hard problems in artificial intelligence. Within their research, each fellow will contend with the central motivating question of AI2050: “It’s 2050. AI has turned out to be hugely beneficial to society. What happened? What are the most important problems we solved and the opportunities and possibilities we realized to ensure this outcome?”
AI2050 Senior Fellow
Sendhil Mullainathan is the Peter de Florez Professor at MIT with dual appointments in the departments of Economics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science who is also a principal investigator at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. His current research is at the intersection of algorithms and people, with a central focus on launching The Bike Shop@MIT, a new research center that works toward more human-centered…
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