Silicon Valley Reminds Harvard: America Is Land of Opportunity
At Inaugural AI Summit at Harvard University, techno-optimism abounds
One consequence of President Trump’s clash with Harvard may be that it pushes the university closer to industry as academic researchers pursue corporate funding to replace federal research grant money whose future is uncertain.
If today’s Inaugural AI Summit at Harvard University is any indication, that could be constructive. And not only financially. It could also help to communicate a more hopeful story to balance the gloomy narrative—“Things are looking pretty bad right now”—widely on offer elsewhere at the university.
The America on stage at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Harvard-adjacent spot where the summit took place, was almost an entirely different one from the one you read about in the headlines or see Harvard students and professors protesting against. Instead of the racist, sexist, imperialist, authoritarian and divided America slouching toward dictatorship amid environmental degradation and inequality, speakers depicted an America of astounding technological progress and unlimited potential.
“In the U.S., it doesn’t matter what your background is, you’re gonna work hard, you’re gonna have the opportunities,” said Arvind Jain, cofounder and CEO of Glean, an AI-powered enterprise search platform recently valued at $7.2 billion. A bit later, he said, “every problem, if there’s a problem, you should go and solve it.”
Another speaker at the event, Jim Keller, the CEO of Tenstorrent, spoke of joining Apple in 2008. Steve Jobs had the concept that to build the best product, you needed the best technology, and for the best technology, you needed the best talents.
“We’re gonna put a supercomputer in the phone,” Keller recalled telling his boss, resetting the bar for phones to be a fast computer and not just a small one.
Keller left Apple, where, he said, “I managed one person and it wasn’t going great,” for Advanced Micro Devices, where he was in charge of 500 people. He read ten management books and followed their advice. It worked. “I had read ten more management books than anyone at AMD,” Keller said. “It was really fun.”
In 2016 he joined Tesla and worked on its self-driving software. “Elon’s really serious about traffic accidents and human safety,” Keller said.
“I fundamentally don’t believe in limits,” Keller said, predicting that the performance of processors would increase about ten times in the next decade. “Every time somebody says there’s a limit you can’t go past, you should ignore them.”
Some people around Harvard for years—even before Trump—have envied the startup ecosystems around MIT and Stanford. Harvard’s biggest recent tech successes are Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates; both had to drop out of the school and move elsewhere to make it big.
A professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Andrew Lo, said that on the horizon are algorithms that will be able to provide customized financial advice to clients in ways that meet the SEC’s definition of fiduciary duty. “You might have a bot accountant,” he said, or “a bot medical professional” that tells you when you need to see a real doctor. Keller said a clothes-folding robot is also within reach.
Organizers said they wanted to “bring a piece of Silicon Valley to Harvard.” The event was convened by the Harvard Data Science Review, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and Archerman Capital, a venture capital firm founded and led by Harry Archerman, who has a PhD from Harvard in applied physics.
Some of the sessions—featuring Archerman on stage alongside Harvard professors gushing over executives of Archerman’s portfolio companies, which include Glean and Tenstorrent—are the sort of thing that might, a few years ago, have given a cautious Harvard bureaucrat a heart attack, or at least a headache. “Harry told me that you are a rock star in Silicon Valley,” a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Francesca Dominici, the faculty director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, said to Jain.
Yet at least one professor was pleased enough that he was already musing about repeat conferences in years ahead. “We will do this indefinitely as long as Harry continues to pay for it,” said Xiao-Li Meng. Meng is the founding editor-in-chief of the Harvard Data Science Review, the Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Statistics at Harvard, and a former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Archerman kicked off the event in the morning by saying he owed Harvard a debt of gratitude for taking a chance on him. By mid-afternoon, when I left, it seemed like he’d repaid that debt several times over. If anything, Harvard owed Archerman for bringing to Cambridge from California, at least for the day, enough businessmen to supply a needed reminder that America, whatever its real stresses and strains, is a land of opportunity.
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