AI & Advanced Computing
Schmidt Sciences awards $18M to researchers working to ensure AI benefits society
Nov 5, 2025
Media Contact: Carlie Wiener; cwiener@schmidtsciences.org
NEW YORK—Schmidt Sciences announced today that 28 scholars studying how to fulfill AI’s potential to dramatically benefit humankind are eligible to receive more than $18 million in AI2050 fellowships. The researchers will pursue efforts to solve challenging problems in AI by building AI scientists, designing safer and more trustworthy AI models and improving the ability of AI to pursue biological and medical research.
The AI2050 program funds researchers to pursue projects to help AI create immense benefits for humanity by 2050. Twenty-one early career fellows and seven senior fellows will receive funding over the next three years. This marks the fourth cohort of the program, which now has 99 fellows across eight countries and 42 institutions.
Previous AI2050 fellows have made large language models more trustworthy, self-driving cars safer, R&D algorithms more efficient and no-code chatbots more useful for K-12 teachers. The fellows have created datasets of cross-cultural human values and a benchmark for artificial intelligence called Humanity’s Last Exam.
“AI is underhyped, especially when it comes to its potential to benefit humanity,” said Eric Schmidt, who co-founded Schmidt Sciences with his wife Wendy. “The AI2050 fellowship was established to turn that potential into reality—by supporting the people and ideas shaping a healthier, more resilient and more secure world.”
In recent years, AI2050 fellows have been named Samsung AI Researcher of the Year and recognized as top innovators by TIME Magazine, the MIT Technology Review and scientific organizations and journals. Last year, the fellows published more than 100 papers and posters in leading publications like Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and npj Robotics.
“The AI2050 fellows are ambitious yet collaborative researchers who focus on AI innovation and the opportunities and challenges in our AI2050 motivating question,” said James Manyika, co-chair of AI2050 and a senior vice president at Google. “This technology can and will bring about an epochal shift in our society—and the AI2050 fellows are shaping that change so it is a benefit for all people.”
In addition to the financial award, AI2050 scholars attend an annual gathering to share findings, learn from experts in the field and network. Fellows are also eligible to apply for additional funding to collaborate with each other on AI2050-related projects. To date, fellows have pursued 17 collaborations including a workshop on AI for drug discovery and generative chemistry models, and an international seminar that connects philosophers working on normative aspects of AI.
Launched in 2022, AI2050 also offers funding to support exceptional computational needs, enabling fellows to accelerate their research and overcome limitations related to hardware access.
“In four years, the AI2050 fellows have created a deep sense of community that we are grateful to be able to grow each year,” said Mark Greaves, executive director of AI2050 and Schmidt Sciences Vice President. “We trust that the network they’ve created will remain a source of inspiration and support throughout their careers as they advance AI for the benefit of all.”
The 2025 AI2050 Senior Fellows are:
Professor, University of Toronto
Professor Aspuru-Guzik will aim to create an AI chemist, a specialized AI scientist that collaborates with human chemists and leverages advanced AI, including large language models and agentic systems, to accelerate scientific discovery in chemistry.
Associate Professor, Stanford University
Professor Ganguli will develop analytic theories that reveal the mechanisms by which large language and generative models create, reason, and learn, drawing on first principles from neuroscience and AI to build a scientific foundation for explainable and trustworthy intelligence.
Professor, Flatiron Institute & New York University
Professor Ho will aim to combine the capabilities of specialized scientific AI models like AlphaFold with more general AI models that can reason about science without understanding it deeply, building a stepping stone toward scientific artificial general intelligence.
Professor, University of Toronto
Professor McIlraith aims to endow AI with a purposeful theory of mind, giving rise to AI systems that can understand beliefs, desires and intentions of themselves and others and choose actions and objectives that consider the welfare and agency of humans.
Professor, University of California at Berkeley
Professor Song will develop AI tools that write computer code and offer mathematical proofs and security specifications to demonstrate that the code is correct and secure, advancing safety and trustworthiness in AI.
Professor, University of Oxford
Professor Torr will bring AI into the humanities by developing a system capable of historical reasoning. In collaboration with Oxford experts, the project will use open-source tools and multimodal data to help AI interpret evidence, test theories of cultural and societal change and explore questions such as what makes societies more cohesive.
Professor, University of Washington
Professor Zettlemoyer will challenge the assumption that underlies present-day language model design—that single models created by a central authority trained on all available data perform best—and improve upon existing designs.
The 2025 AI2050 Early Career Fellows are:
- David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Assistant Professor, Mila – Quebec AI Institute
- Michael Albergo, Incoming Assistant Professor, Harvard University
- Antoine Bosselut, Assistant Professor, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- Charlotte Bunne, Assistant Professor, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- Miles Cranmer, Assistant Professor, University of Cambridge
- Tri Dao, Assistant Professor, Princeton University
- Adam Gleave, Co-founder and CEO, FAR.AI
- Surbhi Goel, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
- Brian Hie, Assistant Professor, Stanford University
- Natasha Jaques, Assistant Professor, University of Washington
- Hannah Kerner, Assistant Professor, Arizona State University
- Zongyi Li, Incoming Assistant Professor, New York University
- Krishna Pillutla, Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
- Lindsey Raymond, Incoming Assistant Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Martin Schrimpf, Assistant Professor, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- Christian Schroeder de Witt, Research Fellow, University of Oxford
- Weiyan Shi, Assistant Professor, Northeastern University
- Tess Smidt, Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Melanie Weber, Assistant Professor, Harvard University
- Ellen Zhong, Assistant Professor, Princeton University
- Peichen Zhong, Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore
About Schmidt Sciences
Schmidt Sciences is a nonprofit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to accelerate scientific knowledge and breakthroughs with the most promising, advanced tools to support a thriving planet. The organization prioritizes research in areas poised for impact including AI and advanced computing, astrophysics, biosciences, climate, and space—as well as supporting researchers in a variety of disciplines through its science systems program.
