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 grasp intelligence by means of tightly coupled scientific inquiry and rigorous engineering. These researchers have interaction 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 programs to deal with 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 habits in people and animals, and likewise learning what we will construct as clever engineering artifacts, we’ll be capable of 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 Pc Science.
“We in SQI consider that understanding human intelligence is without doubt 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’ll 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 nice mysteries of the thoughts
The MIT Siegel Household Quest for Intelligence was lately renamed in recognition of a serious reward from the Siegel Household Endowment that’s enabling additional progress in SQI’s analysis and actions.
SQI’s efforts are organized round missions — long-term, collaborative initiatives 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 the whole Institute,” DiCarlo says. “There was outstanding progress in AI over the previous decade, however I consider the following 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 method.”
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 progressive 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 present the Faculty of Engineering Professor of Instructing Excellence — specializing in sensing and greedy. Later, he co-founded Two Sigma with the idea that progressive 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 providers trade in funding administration, enterprise capital, non-public fairness, and actual property.
Siegel explains, “The human mind might very nicely be probably the most complicated bodily system within the universe, but most individuals have not proven a lot curiosity in the way it works. Folks take the thoughts with no consideration, 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 purposes for this quest; as a substitute, we should always pursue analysis like that accomplished 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 are going to lay the groundwork not just for advancing synthetic intelligence but additionally 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 at present. 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 essential from the start than David Siegel. With out his longstanding dedication to CBMM and his assist for the Quest, this group would possibly by no means have shaped. There’s each cause to suppose that David’s latest reward, which renames the Quest for Intelligence and likewise helps the Schwarzman Faculty of Computing, will probably 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 essential position.”
SQI scientists and engineers are presenting their work broadly, publishing papers, and creating new instruments and applied sciences which are utilized in analysis establishments worldwide, as they have interaction 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 considering biology and varied types of intelligence and the individuals considering AI. We’re working with companions at different universities, in nonprofits, and in trade — we will not do it alone.”
“Basically, we’re not an AI effort. We’re a human intelligence effort utilizing the instruments of engineering,” DiCarlo says. “That provides us, amongst different issues, very helpful insights for human studying and well being, but additionally very helpful instruments for AI — together with AI that can simply work lots higher in a human world.”
The complete SQI group of school, 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, growing their influence on the sector. Within the coming months, the group plans to launch a brand new Social Intelligence Mission.
“We have to give attention to 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 proper questions: “[While] we’re good at choosing duties that check our computational fashions, and we’re extraordinarily good at choosing 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 Subsequent Horizon: Quest’s Future” to rejoice 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.
