MIT is investing $1 billion in an AI college

Ever since the beginning of the AI boom in the early 2010s, there's been a corresponding drought in talented AI developers and researchers. The way to fix this is to educate more of them, and today, MIT announced a $1 billion initiative to do exactly that: it will establish a new college of computing to train the next generation of machine learning mavens. Instead, it will focus on what MIT president L. Rafael Reif calls "the bilinguals of the future." By that, he means students in fields like biology, chemistry, physics, politics, history, and linguistics who also know how to apply machine learning to these disciplines. Two-thirds of the planned $1 billion commitment has been raised so far, with $350 million coming from Stephen A. Schwarzman, CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone.