“AI is going to be the fourth revolution, and it
is going to impact jobs, excellence, efficiency,”
Schwarzman told the BBC. “It is a force for amazing
good and also a potential force for not good.”
Schwarzman compared the rise of AI to the
rise of the internet, which was launched by
computer scientists who thought it was “cool.”
“And parts of it were cool — interconnectedness,
globally the ability to communicate, it is pretty
amazing,” he said. “What they forgot were all
the negatives, this inability to control cyber
bullying, lack of freedom of speech — all kinds
of negative things.”
He says ethics and AI is “one of the major issues
of our age.”
Oxford’s vice chancellor, Louise Richardson, says
the gift is “a significant endorsement of the value
of the humanities in the 21st century.”
Schwarzman co-founded Blackstone, which has
some $512 billion assets under management,
making it a major investment firm.
In recent years, he has made other sizeable
donations to educational institutions. Last
October, he gave $350 million to establish the
MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, which
will also address the challenges of AI.
In 2015, Mr. Schwarzman donated $150 million
to alma mater Yale University and gave $40
million to the Inner-City Scholarship Fund, which
provides tuition assistance to underprivileged
children attending Catholic schools in New York.
In 2013, he founded an international scholarship
program, “Schwarzman Scholars,” at Tsinghua
University in Beijing — a $575 million program is
modeled on the Rhodes Scholarship.