14 OregonStater.org KARL MAASDAM, ’93 VO I C E S ↑ President Murthy with Jensen and Lori Huang, OSU Foundation CEO Shawn Scoville, Dean of Engineering Scott Ashford, College of Engineering students and Digit last spring. Follow her on X at @OregonStatePres. DISRUPTION AND OPPORTUNITY PRESIDENT JAYATHI MURTHY ON HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL SHAPE OREGON STATE’S FUTURE. As told to Scholle McFarland The media tends to emphasize the scary aspects of AI, from it making artists and writers irrelevant to it fueling disinformation. They don’t talk a lot about what AI could do for science. How do you think AI is going to change OSU research? AI is going to be transformative. There’s no question about that in my mind, and I don’t consider it to be hype. At Oregon State, AI will be used to gain deeper insights, to drive new kinds of research and to drive the kind of work that we’re already doing — but to do it faster, to do it better, and to pull in more data. AI can supercharge the rate at which we work. Right now, that rate is determined by how quickly we can synthesize information. In the old days, you’d go to the library, and you’d read a bunch of articles and put in requests for books that needed to be found for you. That’s of course accelerated since the World Wide Web came along. But now with AI, there’s a way of not just searching but synthesizing human knowledge and making it available in a way that allows you to move much, much faster. The kind of research and the kind of results that took you years are possible in months. That is huge. That’s such an important point about searching versus synthesizing. Readers who haven’t experimented with AI yet might think of it as sort of a high-powered search engine. It’s much more than that. It’s going from data to information to knowledge and perhaps, eventually, even to wisdom. You brought up the idea that AI may make artists and writers irrelevant. I don’t know that I agree with that. It’s sort of like when photography came along, there were lots of people who said, “Gosh, why paint anymore?” But artists found a way to interact with that medium to create new things that at one point didn’t exist as art.And the same thing is going to happen here. Sure, there’ll be a certain kind of art that AI will make, but humans, because of their nature, because of their humanity, will interact with the things that AI makes. And there’ll be new modes of expression. What role will the new Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex play in integrating AI into the student experience at OSU? It’s given us a way of focusing on AI on campus. Otherwise, it would be a lot of people doing good things, but without a stake in the ground, without a way of pointing to something that is the heart of AI at the university. The building plays that symbolic role first and foremost. But there’s also a lot of stuff in the building. There is certainly the supercomputer, which provides capacity in a way that most universities in the country don’t have. OSU
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