Stanford GSB dean admits 'I worry' about losing faculty to AI

Sarah Soule, dean of Stanford's Graduate School of Business, isn't hiding her concern about where top academic talent is heading these days. Frontier AI labs, flush with computing power and eyeing lucrative IPOs, are pulling professors out of lecture halls and into corporate research teams.

Andrew Hall and Chad Jones are two of GSB's professors who will be away from Stanford this year. Soule made her remarks to Business Insider shortly after she was on a panel discussion along with Aaron Chatterji, OpenAI's chief economist, who is on leave from Duke University.

Stanford's leave programme gives tenured professors two years of unpaid leave every seven years to work in the private sector, with longer periods allowed for government jobs, as former provost Condoleezza Rice did when she was appointed Secretary of State.

Stanford's public relations team contested the characterisation of these departures as harmful. Kristin Harlan, who is the dean's communications head at GSB, said that industry connections were complementary to the institution's mission.

Soule herself noted that academia still offers something labs can't match: the freedom to pursue research over long timelines without pressure for immediate commercial results.

Besides the staffing challenge, Soule pointed out another issue, which is financial. The university had made an enterprise agreement with Anthropic during the summer so that the students and professors could have access to the tools of Claude.

However, this isn’t sufficient for AI research, and according to Soule, such expenses are increasing.

She said most university leaders share the same worry, calling the budget question one without an easy answer.