President’s address to the Class of 2023

Delivered on June 4, 2023 at the Abu Dhabi Energy Center, Abu Dhabi

Your Highness Sheikh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, your excellencies, and distinguished guests. I am deeply honored and humbled to celebrate the commencement ceremony for the Class of 2023 at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.

First and foremost, congratulations to our 59 new graduates, whose diverse backgrounds span across 25 countries. You graduate at a time when education and many other industries are to be reshaped by artificial intelligence – the very subject of your study. AI’s transformative power compels us to reconsider our understanding of intelligence and social good and to reevaluate the skills that underpin creativity and critical thinking.

Our current education model, centered around memorizing and retrieving information, often fails to prepare us for the real-world challenges we face. Now, we must embrace the profound potential of AI and an educational paradigm that focuses on problem-solving using existing knowledge, and

on the creation of new knowledge. As graduates from the world’s first AI university, you are uniquely equipped to chart this evolving landscape. Despite escalating public interest and concerns around AI, I remain optimistic that human intelligence will adapt and grow as we unlock the limitless potential of this technology. Remember, it wasn’t until photography was invented that artists propelled us into the realms of impressionism, cubism, and beyond. Similarly, we stand on the threshold of a new era of empowerment and enlightenment – a modern-day RenAIssance sparked by the convergence of human intellect and AI capabilities. Imagine a library that transcends space and time, a reservoir of knowledge at your fingertips where you can engage in dialogue, ask questions, and explore the depths of our universe.

You should establish your role and values with these new tools that are now available to you. More importantly, you must nurture and sharpen your ability of independent thinking. We’ve heard the outcries of “human existential risk from AI”, even backed by several big names in the AI community itself, but I urge you to exercise your own knowledge and wisdom to draw your own conclusions. I believe such voices themselves should be subject to rational and serious scientific debates and deliberations, and should not overshadow the advocation of the enormous promise of AI in human life, and the hard work of AI professionals of unlocking such values.

With the encyclopedic and fast-reasoning of AI just a click away, we will also see the rise of a new breed of scholars – the RenAIssance scholars. These individuals will surpass the limitations of fragmented knowledge silos, championing the interdisciplinary pursuit of diverse problems through critical analysis and innovative solutions. I hope that each of you, Class of 2023, will become a RenAIssance scholar, contributing to the continuous evolution and revolution of our society.

As a university deeply rooted in the fabric of the United Arab Emirates, MBZUAI has the privilege of fostering AI creators and change-makers, serving as a symbol of the country’s pursuit of scientific discovery, research excellence, and innovation. With our faculty, staff, and students, the achievements we have made in the past three years are nothing short of extraordinary; from the creation of an open-source chatbot Vicuña which outperforms almost all other models and consumes a very small fraction of the energy budget and memory footprint of large language models, and developing new learning experiences in the metaverse that allow education to reach the most remote corners of the world, to exploring the potential of AI in accelerating the future of precision medicine. And you, the graduating class, are an integral part of these grand endeavors.

As you venture into the next stage of your journey, I urge you to remain curious, uphold the virtues of courage, humility, compassion, honor, and perseverance, and keep in mind our university’s motto, ‘Power from knowledge to serve’. Remember, AI does not generate new knowledge; it’s the brilliance of human intellect and wisdom that hold the true competitive advantage.

Echoing Napoleon’s words to his soldiers after the battle of Austerlitz, I wish to say to you, “You have fulfilled all my expectations of your bravery and boldness!”

I extend my heartfelt best wishes for all your future endeavors!

Thank you.