They have always dressed it up as concerned humanitarianism. They did it already with large donations in the past:

https://www.philanthropy.com/news/can-a-350-million-gift-cha...

All concerns, while the real goal is stated right in the article:

"With this new approach, he says, experts in many fields can gain a deeper understanding of AI so they can better harness it. Meanwhile, computing experts are gaining greater exposure to the work of their counterparts in other fields. That exposure is giving the technologists a better understanding of how to create and train AI tools to better serve others."

I'm sure they will have many meetings about future meetings.

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frognumber 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Makes me sick.

MIT is so very, very overcapitalized.

These things don't lead to anything other than a rich guy getting his name on a building, and more corruption in academia. By far the best thing which could happen to MIT would be for 95% of the endowment to go up in a poof of smoke, bringing it back to nineties levels. That's the end of the period when the Institute did high-integrity research.

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jacobolus 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It sounds like you want a return to a time before a lot of the government research money coming to institutions like MIT was gutted.

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frognumber 7 hours ago | parent [-]

No, today institutions like Georgia Tech -- which has an endowment of just about the same as MIT in the nineties adjusted for inflation -- seem to function just about the same way as MIT did back then.

I want to get back to the era before people went to MIT as a center of wealth, power, and prestige, and would lie and cheat to get tenured positions there, to where it was a place where nerds went to nerd together.

And to a place where every !@#$% done didn't lead to a self-hyping press release, but where statements were precise, measured, calibrated, and most importantly, scientifically-accurate.

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5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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plasticchris 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Anywhere the nerds or artists go, if they are good, eventually becomes overrun with such types. Just look at the state of Silicon Valley and y combinator, and gentrification in general…

	▲	bananaflag 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths