A $75 Million Gift for CUNY Dedicated to A.I.

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll look at how Gov. Kathy Hochul’s artificial intelligence initiative is taking shape. We’ll also look at a key lawyer’s decision to drop Donald Trump as a client in two cases in Manhattan.

Credit…Ángel Franco/The New York Times
One piece of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed artificial intelligence plan is about to fall into place.
Last week she called for a statewide consortium on artificial intelligence. She outlined a public-private partnership that would be spurred on by $275 million in state money, with a center that would be used by half a dozen public and private universities. Each would contribute $25 million to the project, known as Empire A.I.
Tomorrow, one of the six institutions, the City University of New York, will announce that it is receiving a $75 million gift and that $25 million will be CUNY’s contribution to Empire A.I.
The CUNY chancellor, Félix Matos Rodríguez, said that CUNY would allocate the remaining $50 million to hire a director and as many as 25 faculty members, and to set up a new Master of Science program through the CUNY Graduate Center.
The donation is coming from the Simons Foundation, set up by James and Marilyn Simons. Simons was the chairman of the mathematics department at the State University at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) before starting a hedge fund management firm, and Marilyn, his wife, is a Stony Brook alumna. Forbes ranked him 49th among the world’s billionaires in 2023, with $28.1 billion.
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