The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence (SQI), a research unit within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, brings together researchers from across MIT who mix their diverse expertise to grasp intelligence through tightly coupled scientific inquiry and rigorous engineering. These researchers engage in collaborative efforts spanning science, engineering, the humanities, and more.
SQI seeks to grasp how brains produce intelligence and the way it might be replicated in artificial systems to deal with real-world problems that exceed the capabilities of current artificial intelligence technologies.
“In SQI, we’re studying intelligence scientifically and generically, within the hope that by studying neuroscience and behavior in humans and animals, and likewise studying what we will construct as intelligent engineering artifacts, we’ll have the option to grasp the elemental underlying principles of intelligence,” says Leslie Pack Kaelbling, SQI director of research and the Panasonic Professor within the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
“We in SQI consider that understanding human intelligence is one among the best open questions in science — right 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 parts: how it really works, and where it comes from. If we understand those, we are going to see payoffs well beyond our current imaginings,” says Jim DiCarlo, SQI director and the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience within the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Exploring the nice mysteries of the mind
The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence was recently renamed in recognition of a significant gift from the Siegel Family Endowment that’s enabling further growth in SQI’s research and activities.
SQI’s efforts are organized around missions — long-term, collaborative projects rooted in foundational questions on intelligence and supported by platforms — systems, and software that enable latest research and create benchmarking and testing interfaces.
“Ours is the one unit at MIT dedicated to constructing a scientific understanding of intelligence while working with researchers across the complete Institute,” DiCarlo says. “There was remarkable progress in AI over the past decade, but I consider the subsequent decade will bring even greater advances in our understanding of human intelligence — advances that can 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 on the intersections of learning, workforce, and infrastructure. SFE funds organizations addressing society’s most important challenges while supporting progressive civic and community leaders, social entrepreneurs, researchers, and others driving this work forward. Siegel is a pc scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. While in graduate school at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, he worked on robotics within the group of Tomás Lozano-Pérez — currently the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Excellence — specializing in sensing and grasping. Later, he co-founded Two Sigma with the idea that progressive technology, AI, and data science could help uncover value on the earth’s data. Today, Two Sigma drives transformation across the financial services industry in investment management, enterprise capital, private equity, and real estate.
Siegel explains, “The human brain may thoroughly be essentially the most complex physical system within the universe, yet most individuals have not shown much interest in how it really works. People take the mind as a right, yet wonder a lot about other scientific mysteries, resembling 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 business applications for this quest; as an alternative, we should always pursue research like that done on the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence to advance our understanding of ourselves. As we uncover more about human intelligence, I’m hopeful that we’ll lay the groundwork not just for advancing artificial intelligence but additionally for extending our own pondering.”
As a long-time champion of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), a National Science Foundation-funded collaborative interdisciplinary research thrust, and one among the primary donors to the MIT Quest for Intelligence, David Siegel helped lay the muse for the research underway today. In early 2024, he founded Open Athena, a nonprofit that bridges the gap between academic research and the innovative of AI. Open Athena equips universities with elite AI and data engineering talent 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 also sits on the boards of Re:Construct Manufacturing, Khan Academy, NYC FIRST, and Carnegie Hall.
A Catalyst for Global Collaboration
MIT President Sally Kornbluth says, “Of all of the donors and supporters whose generosity fueled the Quest for Intelligence, nobody has been more essential from the start 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 likewise supports the Schwarzman College of Computing, will probably be much more powerful in shaping the longer term of this initiative and of the sphere itself.” She continues, “Fueled by generous donors — particularly David Siegel’s transformative gift — SQI is poised to tackle a fair more essential role.”
SQI scientists and engineers are presenting their work broadly, publishing papers, and developing latest tools and technologies which are utilized in research institutions worldwide, as they engage with colleagues in disciplines across the Institute and in universities and institutions across the globe. DiCarlo explains, “We’re a part of the Schwarzman College of Computing, on the nexus between the people concerned with biology and various types of intelligence and the people concerned with AI. We’re working with partners at other universities, in nonprofits, and in industry — we will not do it alone.”
“Fundamentally, we’re not an AI effort. We’re a human intelligence effort using the tools of engineering,” DiCarlo says. “That offers us, amongst other things, very useful insights for human learning and health, but additionally very useful tools for AI — including AI that can just work lots higher in a human world.”
Your entire SQI community of school, students, and staff is happy to face latest challenges within the efforts to grasp the basics of intelligence.
Latest missions and next horizons
SQI research is broadening: Mission principal investigators are integrating their efforts across areas of interest, increasing their impact on the sphere. In the approaching months, the organization plans to launch a brand new Social Intelligence Mission.
“We want to deal with problems that mirror natural and artificial intelligence — ensuring that we’re evaluating latest models on tasks that mirror what humans and other natural intelligence can do,” says Nick Roy, SQI director of systems engineering and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. He predicts that SQI’s future research will depend on asking the fitting questions: “[While] we’re good at picking tasks that test our computational models, and we’re extremely good at picking tasks that form of align with what our models can already do, we’d like to recover at selecting tasks and benchmarks that also elicit something about natural intelligence,” he says.
On November 24, 2025, faculty, staff, students, and supporters gathered at an event titled “The Next Horizon: Quest’s Future” to have fun SQI’s next chapter. The event consisted of a day of research updates, a panel discussion, and a poster session on latest 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 can be found on SQI’s YouTube channel.