The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence (SQI), a analysis unit within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, brings collectively researchers from throughout MIT who mix their numerous experience to perceive intelligence by tightly coupled scientific inquiry and rigorous engineering. These researchers interact in collaborative efforts spanning science, engineering, the humanities, and extra.
SQI seeks to comprehend how brains produce intelligence and the way it may be replicated in synthetic techniques to deal with real-world issues that exceed the capabilities of present synthetic intelligence applied sciences.
“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, SQI director of analysis and the Panasonic Professor within the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
“We in SQI believe that understanding human intelligence is one of the greatest open questions in science — right up there with the origin of the universe and our place in it, and the origin of life. The question of human intelligence has two parts: how it works, and where it comes from. If we understand those, we will see payoffs well beyond our current imaginings,” says Jim DiCarlo, SQI director and the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Exploring the great mysteries of the mind
The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence was recently renamed in recognition of a major gift from the Siegel Family Endowment that 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.”
A legacy of interdisciplinary support
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 the group of Tomás Lozano-Pérez — currently the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Excellence — 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.”
As a long-time champion of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), a National Science Foundation-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 the moment. 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 information engineering expertise to speed up breakthrough discoveries at scale. Siegel serves on the MIT Corporation Executive Committee, is vice-chair of the Scratch Foundation, and is a member of the Cornell Tech Council. He additionally sits on the boards of Re:Build Manufacturing, Khan Academy, NYC FIRST, and Carnegie Hall.
A Catalyst for Global Collaboration
MIT President Sally Kornbluth says, “Of all the donors and supporters whose generosity fueled the Quest for Intelligence, no one has been more important from the beginning than David Siegel. Without his longstanding commitment to CBMM and his support for the Quest, this community might never have formed. There’s every reason to think that David’s recent gift, which renames the Quest for Intelligence and also supports 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 — SQI is poised to take on an even more important role.”
SQI scientists and engineers are presenting their work broadly, publishing papers, and growing new instruments and applied sciences which are utilized in analysis establishments worldwide, as they interact with colleagues in disciplines throughout the Institute and in universities and establishments across the globe. 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 complete SQI group of school, college students, and workers is happy to face new challenges within the efforts to perceive the basics of intelligence.
New missions and subsequent horizons
SQI analysis is broadening: Mission principal investigators are integrating their efforts throughout areas of curiosity, rising their influence on the sector. In the approaching months, the group plans to launch a new Social Intelligence Mission.
“We want to deal with 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 techniques engineering and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. He predicts that SQI’s future analysis will depend on asking the best questions: “[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,” he says.
On November 24, 2025, school, workers, college students, and supporters gathered at an occasion titled “The Next Horizon: Quest’s Future” to have fun 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 Family Endowment, and numerous members of the MIT Corporation. Recordings of the displays from the occasion can be found on SQI’s YouTube channel.
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