Report: AAAI Presidential Panel on the Future of AI Research [pdf] (aaai.org)

The AAAI 2025 Presidential Panel released a comprehensive report (March 2025) charting the future of AI research. Convened by AAAI President Francesca Rossi, the study synthesized contributions from 24 expert panelists (including Stuart Russell, Eric Horvitz, Yoshua Bengio) across 17 topic chapters and a community survey of 475 respondents. It maps major shifts—greater corporate participation tied to hardware access, rapid move toward agentic and emergent capabilities, growing emphasis on ethics, safety, sustainability, and geopolitical competition—and stresses the need to rethink peer review, evaluation, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Technically, the report flags urgent research priorities: rigorous, verifiable reasoning (noting LLMs deliver plausible but not guaranteed inferences), stronger benchmarks and evaluation methodology for emergent behaviors and autonomous agents, and co-design of architectures with dedicated AI hardware (GPUs remain central). It highlights the tension between sound formal methods (SAT/SMT/constraint solvers, probabilistic models) and large-scale pretrained systems, calls for domain-specific evaluation and verification tools for high-stakes deployment, and urges international cooperation to address access, governance, and reproducibility challenges. The document is both a diagnostic of current capabilities and a roadmap emphasizing verification, evaluation, hardware-aware design, and multidisciplinary research to make AI more reliable and societally aligned.