> 1) CMU establishing a 'department' of AI (where MIT had merely an AI track within the CS program)CMU's Machine Learning Department was founded in 2006, before the current AI hype cycle started. If this is MIT's response to a 'department' of AI, then MIT has been asleep for >10 years.
Perhaps you mean CMU's new undergraduate AI degree. But that is not a new department. It's merely a separate major within the existing school. And not really comparable to MIT's recent announcement, which is much more focused on research than new undergraduate majors.
> Yet I can't imagine why an entire 'college' of AI is needed. AI simply isn't a field that's deep or broad enough to warrant an entire college with a handful of distinct majors, like an engineering college or medical school.
The article discusses this point.
Let's start from the premise that MIT is going to focus a lot its hiring efforts on "Computational X" for all X in which it hires. There are basically three advantages to introducing a new academic unit instead of hiring Computational X people into the X department:
1. Collaboration
2. The "X" department might be ossified and unwelcoming to "Computational X". So from a P&T incentive structure perspective, starting a new department/college can make sense.
3. Naming rights => $$$
> Each of this college's AI degrees will span distinct problem or solution spaces? Not likely.
They're hiring 50 faculty, and half those lines will be dedicated to non computer scientists. That's larger than many R1 CS departments. So, they're certainly hiring enough manpower to run several innovative educational programs.
This also explains why it's a college instead of a department. Hiring historians, philosophers, MD/PhDs, biologists, engineers, and computer scientists into the any single pre-existing college would be pretty awkward.