A new name, a continued commitment to understanding intelligence

Founded in 2018, the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence (SQI) brings together researchers from across MIT who combine their diverse expertise to understand intelligence through tightly coupled scientific inquiry and rigorous engineering. They engage in coordinated, collaborative efforts spanning science, engineering, the humanities, and more. SQI’s goal is to understand intelligence — how brains produce it and how it can be replicated in artificial systems to address real-world problems that exceed the capabilities of current AI technologies.

"In SQI, we are studying intelligence scientifically and generically, in the hope that by studying neuroscience and behavior in humans and animals, and also studying what we can build as intelligent engineering artifacts, we'll be able to understand the fundamental underlying principles of intelligence," says Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Panasonic Professor (EECS) and SQI Director of Research.

A recent major gift from the Siegel Family Endowment is enabling further growth in SQI’s research and activities. SQI's efforts are organized around "Missions" — long-term, collaborative projects rooted in foundational questions about intelligence — and supported by "Platforms" — systems and software that enable new research and create benchmarking and testing interfaces. "Ours is the only unit at MIT dedicated to building a scientific understanding of intelligence while working with researchers across the entire Institute," DiCarlo says. “There has been remarkable progress in AI over the past decade, but I believe the next decade will bring even greater advances in our understanding of human intelligence — advances that will reshape what we call AI. By supporting us, David Siegel, the Siegel Family Endowment, and our other donors are demonstrating their confidence in our approach."

In 2011, David Siegel, SM '86, PhD '91, founded the Siegel Family Endowment (SFE) to support organizations working at the intersections of learning, workforce, and infrastructure. SFE funds organizations addressing society’s most critical challenges while supporting innovative civic and community leaders, social entrepreneurs, researchers, and others driving this work forward. Siegel is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. While in graduate school at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, he worked on robotics in Prof. Tomás Lozano-Pérez’s group, focusing on sensing and grasping. Later, he co-founded Two Sigma with the belief that innovative technology, AI, and data science could help uncover value in the world's data. Today, Two Sigma drives transformation across the financial services industry in investment management, venture capital, private equity, and real estate.

Siegel explains, "The human brain may very well be the most complex physical system in the universe, yet most people haven't shown much interest in how it works. People take the mind for granted, yet wonder so much about other scientific mysteries, such as the origin of the universe. My fascination with the brain and its intersection with artificial intelligence stems from this. I don’t care whether there are commercial applications for this quest; instead, we should pursue research like that done at the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence to advance our understanding of ourselves. As we uncover more about human intelligence, I am hopeful that we will lay the groundwork not only for advancing artificial intelligence but also for extending our own thinking."

Siegel was one of the first donors to the MIT Quest for Intelligence, laying the foundation for the research underway today. His philanthropic efforts underscore his conviction that education, science, and technology are key to building a better world. In early 2024, he founded Open Athena, a nonprofit that bridges the gap between academic research and the cutting edge of AI. Open Athena equips universities with elite AI and data engineering talent to accelerate breakthrough discoveries at scale. Siegel serves on the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, is Vice-Chair of the Scratch Foundation, and is a member of the Cornell Tech Council. He also sits on the boards of Re:Build Manufacturing, Khan Academy, NYC FIRST, and Carnegie Hall.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth says, "Of all the donors and supporters whose generosity has fueled the Quest thus far, no one has been more important from the beginning than David Siegel. Without his longstanding commitment to the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines and his support for the Quest, this community might never have formed. There’s every reason to think that David’s recent gift, which will name the Quest for Intelligence and also support the Schwarzman College of Computing, will be even more powerful in shaping the future of this initiative and of the field itself." She continues, "Fueled by generous donors — particularly David Siegel’s transformative gift — the Quest is poised to take on an even more important role."

SQI scientists and engineers are presenting their work broadly, publishing significant papers, and developing new tools and technologies that are used in research institutions worldwide, as they engage with colleagues in disciplines across the Institute and in universities and institutions worldwide. DiCarlo explains, "We're part of the Schwarzman College of Computing, at the nexus between the people interested in biology and various forms of intelligence and the people interested in AI. We're working with partners at other universities, in nonprofits, and in industry — we can't do it alone."

"Fundamentally, we're not an AI effort. We're a human intelligence effort using the tools of engineering," DiCarlo says. "That gives us, among other things, very useful insights for human learning and health, but also very useful tools for AI — including AI that will just work a lot better in a human world." The entire SQI community of faculty, students, and staff is excited to face new challenges in the efforts to understand the fundamentals of intelligence. 

SQI research is broadening — Mission PIs are integrating their efforts across areas of interest, increasing their impact on the field. In the coming months, the organization plans to launch a new Social Intelligence Mission. When asked about next directions, SQI Director of Systems Engineering Professor Nick Roy commented that "We need to focus on problems that mirror natural and artificial intelligence — we need to make sure that we are evaluating new models on tasks that mirror what humans and other natural intelligence can do." He predicts that SQI’s future research will rely on asking the right questions, stating that while "we are good at picking tasks that test our computational models, and we're extremely good at picking tasks that kind of align with what our models can already do; we need to get better at choosing tasks and benchmarks that also elicit something about natural intelligence. I think we should hold ourselves to a little bit tighter account for the tasks and problems that we're choosing."

On November 24, 2025, faculty, staff, students, and supporters gathered at an event titled "Next Horizons: The Quest's Future" to celebrate SQI’s next chapter. The event consisted of an afternoon of research updates, a panel discussion, and a poster session on new and evolving research, and was attended by David Siegel, representatives from the Siegel Family Endowment, and various members of the MIT Corporation. Recordings of the presentations from the event are available on SQI’s YouTube channel.

With support from David Siegel and the Siegel Family Endowment, the new SQI is empowered to accelerate its pursuit of advancing fundamental research uncovering the principles of intelligence and driving new insights into its underlying mechanisms. We are grateful to our community of supporters both within and outside MIT for joining us on this exciting journey!