Netflix co-founder and executive chairman Reed Hastings has given $50 million to his alma mater, Bowdoin College in Maine, in support of a new initiative centered on AI.
The gift, which is the largest in Bowdoin’s history, will enable the school to hire 10 new faculty members in a range of disciplines. It will help current faculty members looking to incorporate AI in their teaching, research, and artistic work and also support conversations about AI’s uses and challenges, including workshops, symposia, and support for student research.
“This donation seeks to advance Bowdoin’s mission of cultivating wisdom for the common good by deepening the college’s engagement with one of humanity’s most transformative developments: artificial intelligence,” Hastings said in a press release. “We aim to develop leaders who can be ‘at home’ in both the present and future technological landscape.”
Hastings graduated from Bowdoin in 1983 and went on to earn a Master’s degree in artificial intelligence from Stanford before embarking on his career in technology. Netflix was founded in 1997. Hastings stepped down as Co-CEO of Netflix in 2023.
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Bowdoin president Safa Zaki, whose research focuses on building and testing computational models of mind, said the gift from Hastings will help the college infuse humanity into the study and application of AI. “Bowdoin is ideally positioned to meet the challenges and opportunities of AI,” she said. “Our deep commitment to the liberal arts and the common good position us to think together about what we are going to value in human cognition, and what we will want our AI systems to do – or not do – going forward in service to humanity.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Hastings said he remains optimistic about the positive impact AI can have, but the aim of the gift is to bolster the study of all of the implications of the technology.
“I’m an extreme techno-optimist and view most of human progress as technology progress on one side and moral-ethical systems on the other side,” Hastings said. “The tech progress is moving ahead very nicely. Our moral-ethical system improvements need some bolstering.”
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