AI2050

AI2050 is a philanthropic research initiative housed within Schmidt Sciences, the science philanthropy founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt as a successor to Schmidt Futures. AI2050 was launched in February 2022 and is grounded in a central motivating question: 'It's 2050. AI has turned out to be hugely beneficial to society. What happened?' The program works backward from that aspirational outcome to identify the problems that must be solved and opportunities that must be seized for AI to benefit humanity. Eric and Wendy Schmidt committed $125 million over five years to support the initiative. Eric Schmidt and James Manyika serve as co-chairs, with Mark Greaves as Executive Director. The initiative operates through a closed nominations process, drawing on a network of approximately 300 AI experts worldwide to identify candidates. There is no open application process. Awards are made to both early-career and senior fellows for three-year research projects. In the fourth cohort announced in November 2025, 28 scholars received more than $18 million in fellowships (21 early-career fellows and 7 senior fellows). Across all cohorts, the program has supported 99 fellows at 42 institutions in 8 countries. Notable fellows have included Fei-Fei Li, Daniela Rus, David Autor, and Yejin Choi. In February 2025, Schmidt Sciences also announced a separate $10 million AI Science Safety program with 27 projects, including work by Yoshua Bengio on AI risk mitigation and Zico Kolter on AI attack vectors. The initiative has published a Working List of Ten Hard Problems in AI covering: (1) Capabilities, (2) Assurance, (3) Alignment, (4) Great Opportunities, (5) Economics, (6) Access, (7) Responsibility, (8) Geopolitics, (9) Governance, and (10) Meaning. This list is intended to evolve as AI capabilities progress. Fellows publish over 100 papers annually in leading journals and conferences, and 17 active cross-fellow collaborations are underway as of late 2025. Schmidt Sciences is headquartered in New York, NY, and AI2050 operates as one of its five programmatic centers alongside Astrophysics and Space, Biosciences, Climate, and Cross-Science programs.