Good morning. It's Tuesday. We'll look at how Gov. Kathy Hochul's artificial intelligence initiative is taking shape. We'll also look at a key lawyer's decision to drop Donald Trump as a client in two cases in Manhattan.
One piece of Gov. Kathy Hochul's proposed artificial intelligence plan is about to fall into place. Last week she called for a statewide consortium on artificial intelligence. She outlined a public-private partnership that would be spurred on by $275 million in state money, with a center that would be used by half a dozen public and private universities. Each would contribute $25 million to the project, known as Empire A.I. Tomorrow, one of the six institutions, the City University of New York, will announce that it is receiving a $75 million gift and that $25 million will be CUNY's contribution to Empire A.I. The CUNY chancellor, Félix Matos Rodríguez, said that CUNY would allocate the remaining $50 million to hire a director and as many as 25 faculty members, and to set up a new Master of Science program through the CUNY Graduate Center. The donation is coming from the Simons Foundation, set up by James and Marilyn Simons. Simons was the chairman of the mathematics department at the State University at Stony Brook (now Stony Brook University) before starting a hedge fund management firm, and Marilyn, his wife, is a Stony Brook alumna. Forbes ranked him 49th among the world's billionaires in 2023, with $28.1 billion. A record setter for CUNYMatos Rodríguez said the $75 million was the largest donation in CUNY's history (topping the $52 million donation Hunter College's nursing school received in 2022). But it is a fraction of what the Simonses have given to Stony Brook, including $500 million last year. The Simons Foundation is also putting $100 million into the $700 million climate-change research center on Governors Island. David Spergel, the president of the Simons Foundation, said that the gift to CUNY had been in the talking stages for "maybe six months" and that he first heard about the Empire A.I. proposal about three months ago. "It stimulated us to grow the CUNY program," he said, adding that Empire A.I. would provide the hardware for high-end supercomputing. Hochul's proposal envisions a center in upstate New York with the computing power to run A.I. software and remote accessibility for researchers and students. Hochul's Empire A.I. proposal comes as artificial intelligence is drawing extraordinary attention and huge private investments. Companies like Microsoft, which edged past Apple last week to become the world's most valuable company, have reigned in A.I. in large part because they had the power- and data-hungry computational resources to build on. Another darling of Wall Street, Nvidia, climbed to a market capitalization of $1 trillion last year on its strength in A.I. chips. But investors' enthusiasm has been matched by concerns that A.I. needs regulatory guardrails. Hochul has committed to other big tech investments in the past: In 2022 she signed off on a $5.5 billion package of incentives to clinch the deal for Micron's new semiconductor manufacturing facility outside Syracuse.
But the state's fiscal picture is different now. For Empire A.I., Hochul will have to persuade the Legislature to go along as Albany addresses a looming budget deficit. Matos Rodríguez said Empire A.I. would strengthen the degree-to-career pipeline across the CUNY system by providing research experience for undergraduates, along with tuition subsidies and fellowship stipends for graduate students. And Spergel said that Empire A.I. "has the potential" to make a difference for New York by laying the groundwork for jobs and companies in machine learning, high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. "My view of this, both working as a researcher in this area and watching my children work in start-ups in this area, is that A.I. will be a very powerful assistant," Spergel said when I asked about the need for guardrails as A.I. develops. "If we expect it to serve as an assistant, it can be very helpful. Perhaps the most important guardrail is there must be a human in the loop." WEATHER A winter weather advisory will be in effect until 1 p.m. Prepare for snow, sleet and rain with temperatures just above freezing during the day. At night, it will be clear, and temperatures will dip into the low 20s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING Suspended today for snow removal operations. The latest New York news
We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. A Trump lawyer drops out
Donald Trump's second defamation trial involving allegations by the writer E. Jean Carroll begins today. For two other cases — including his appeal of the $5 million verdict in Carroll's first case — his defense team will have one fewer lawyer.
The lawyer Joseph Tacopina withdrew from the criminal case against Trump that is to go to trial in Manhattan in March. Tacopina also walked away from representing Trump in the appeal of the $5 million verdict. Carroll, who said Trump raped her in a dressing room in a Fifth Avenue department store in the 1990s, sued after he scorned her claim as "a complete con job." The jury awarded Carroll $2 million for assault and nearly $3 million for defamation. Tacopina, who led Trump's defense at that trial, did not say why he had decided to withdraw from the appellate proceeding or from Trump's criminal trial. That case revolves around whether Trump doctored business records to mask where hush-money payments for the porn actress Stormy Daniels had come from. Trump recently said that he wanted to testify at the new Carroll trial, and Tacopina was not listed as a lawyer in the proceeding. Trump has said he regretted going along with Tacopina's advice not to take the stand in the first one. Tacopina was not listed as a lawyer for the second Carroll trial. A spokesman for Trump did not directly address Tacopina's withdrawal from the other cases. The spokesman, Steven Cheung, said only that Trump had "the most experienced, qualified, disciplined and overall strongest legal team ever assembled." The trial that begins today turns on statements Trump made in 2019 after Carroll went public with the allegation that Trump had raped her. He called her story "totally false," saying he had never met her. She is seeking $10 million for damage to her reputation, as well as unspecified punitive damages. METROPOLITAN DIARY Diner on Broadway
Dear Diary: My husband and I went to a diner on Broadway for breakfast. Work was being done in our apartment, and the place was mostly uninhabitable. We were grumpy and hungry. The diner was quiet. We settled into a booth, ordered coffee and began to relax. A man sitting a few booths away was on the phone. It seemed like some kind of business call. He got louder and louder, and I made a gesture suggesting he lower the volume. He responded by loudly telling the person he was talking to what he was looking at and then yelling at me that I should move if I wasn't happy. I yelled back that he should move. After he finished his call, I glanced over at him. He looked like a nice man. I began to feel some regret. He walked by our table on his way out. I apologized, and he apologized, too. He said he had been born and bred in the Bronx and could not help getting loud and excited when he talked on the phone. We chuckled, shook hands and left it at that. When my husband and I finished our meal, we asked for the check. The man with the loud voice had already paid, the waiter said. — Nancy Greene Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Bernard Mokam and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: A $75 million gift for CUNY
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