When outgoing now University of Wyoming President Ed Seidel wanted to test a new artificial intelligence system fed with data about university regulations. He asked what seemed like a simple question: Should the President provide a horse when it comes to Prexy’s Pasture?
Prexy’s Pasture is the name of a popular lawn on campus. And yes, at the University of Wyoming, horse care is a presidential duty.
“That is stated in the regulations, for example,” Seidel said. “And I assumed it was an easy test. But it actually said ‘no’. I’m like, ‘What? No?’
“And then it was explained, because the president has the authority to delegate that duty to anyone on campus. And so the response was very sophisticated.”
The AI system, developed by computer science professor Lars Kotthoff using open-source large language models incorporated into all university regulations, had found the truth in what had become an urban legend on campus.
More importantly, it showed how artificial intelligence could penetrate every corner of a university’s operations and glean insights.
With Seidel preparing to step down as president at the end of the spring 2026 semester and Kotthoff on sabbatical in Paris before taking a job at St. Andrews — Scotland’s oldest university — the pair say AI is already everywhere and has revolutionary potential for UW and Wyoming.
The university even offers a Master of Science degree in artificial intelligence, describing the field as “rapidly transforming society.”
AI Foundation
As he wraps up his presidency, Seidel remains committed to the development of AI across the state and sees the rise of the technology as part of a long arc, dating back to the 1950s, around the time he was born.
But when chatbots arrived on the scene about three years ago, everything went into overdrive: in commerce, creativity and on college campuses.
“It was amazing what they could do,” Seidel said. “And so we immediately had task forces to look at it and we really realized that we needed to take this to every student and work with different groups across the state because it’s going to have a lot of impact.”
That realization led to Wyoming’s AI initiative.
In September, the university announced nearly $9 million in funding – $6.25 million in donor and industry commitments, supplemented by $2.5 million in state money – to advance AI innovation across Wyoming.
“This investment reflects our commitment to positioning Wyoming as a leader in AI,” Seidel said in announcing the initiative. “By combining state-of-the-art research with real-world applications in energy, agriculture, healthcare and more, we are empowering our students, educators, communities and industries to thrive in an AI-driven future.”
The money came after a thoughtful approach by state lawmakers, Seidel said.
“Let’s give you $2.5 million, with the requirement that it be matched by non-public funding, to see what you can do with it,” he said was the message from the Legislature. “And so our idea was that we wanted some funding to attract companies or other organizations, like the city of Laramie or the hospital or whatever it was, to work with the university to explore how AI can be used to support their business or their industry.”
The response from Wyoming businesses has been enthusiastic across the board, he said.
“I don’t think there was one company we talked to that wasn’t excited to work with us,” Seidel said. “And so I hope that this is just the beginning of increasing our impact on the state and our partnerships with businesses. So I’m very optimistic about that.”
A particularly promising partnership involves Safran, a French aerospace company.
“They expect to bring in as many as 200 staff members in the coming years,” Seidel said. “And they are very interested in applying AI technologies to their entertainment systems that they make for airlines – Boeing and Airbus and so on.”
Resistance
Academia’s initial response to AI tools like ChatGPT was often defensive, Seidel acknowledged, with faculty groups focusing on how to prevent students from cheating.
“Let’s just say it’s clearly a very disruptive technology,” he said. “And so there will be a lot of reactions.”
Like the technology itself, people – especially students – are constantly gathering new input, building on information bit by bit and building a knowledge base.
“Back in the day, I remember when calculators came out and they were banned in classrooms because you had to be able to do long division,” Seidel says. “But does anyone really need to do that anymore?”
Now, like calculators, AI should be accessible to all students, Siedel said, regardless of their economic circumstances.
“We’re looking at developing internal models, and we’re playing with them, and we’re also looking at licensing that we could pay for from companies like OpenAI or from Google and others,” he said. “And so we’re still negotiating that and looking at what would be best.
“But we want to make these tools available to everyone, whether they can afford them or not.”
The need is clear, Seidel said.
“If you don’t have access to it, you’re going to be disadvantaged,” he said. ‘And I’m mainly thinking about two different things.
“I want our students to get the education they need to enter the workforce. And that will increasingly be imperative for them.”
Seidel sees more and more teachers becoming better at AI, “so they can advance their research or use it more effectively in the classroom, or to be more competitive in obtaining external funding.”
Scotland bound
Kotthoff, who was an associate professor at UW from 2017 through September, used a homegrown visual in laying out the playing field for AI today.
When it comes to the generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude that dominate the headlines, in Kotthoff’s analogy they resemble the city of Jackson.
That’s because Jackson is flashy, attractive to investors and not representative of the rest of Wyoming.
Kotthoff tells his classes that beyond the spotlight on ChatGPT and Claude, there’s also “good old-fashioned AI”: approaches that provide demonstrable solutions to complex problems and aren’t as sexy as a chatbot, but can accelerate growth in Wyoming’s economy.
Kotthoff works on symbolic reasoning and optimization problems, the kind he said people armed with AI can prove a solution is correct, unlike ChatGPT’s sometimes confident but completely wrong answers.
“That answer is completely wrong and not even a little bit correct, but we are confident that it is the answer,” he said, pointing out common flaws in generative AI.
In his work, Kotthoff said the goal is to generate solutions to problems “where you can prove that this is actually an answer.”
His classic example: the traveling salesman problem, where you need to find the most efficient route through multiple cities.
The promise is enormous efficiency, also on campus.
“It can range from a year of student time to the ability to do it in maybe an hour or two using a large language model,” he said. “I would love to see Wyoming do more of that, and especially the University of Wyoming to drive that, because that’s the natural place to do it.”
His new position at St. Andrews will continue his interdisciplinary work, now based in Paris for research before teaching begins next summer.
“I will be working with people from different disciplines in different departments to really apply these state-of-the-art AI techniques to other areas to solve the interesting problems there,” he said, describing a “virtuous circle” in which applying AI to other areas leads to improvements that then improve the AI methods themselves.
Lessons from the latest technological revolution
For Seidel, watching the rise of AI brings with it a sense of déjà vu.
As a research scientist at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications, he witnessed the rise of Internet legend Marc Andreessen and the birth of the Web browser.
“I knew him as a student with these kind of really cool projects, you know, the Mosaic web browser,” Seidel said.
In 1993, Seidel was part of a group that traveled to Apple Computer to convince them to bundle a Web browser with their operating system – “Mac OS 6 or 7 or something like that.”
“And they just weren’t really sure that they should do that,” he recalled. “And then Microsoft ended up buying it and it became Internet Explorer. So there was a missed opportunity there for Apple.”
That experience taught him something about revolutionary technologies: “We didn’t know what it was going to do.”
Now, decades later, another revolutionary technology is arriving – this time in drive-thrus for fast food restaurants and customer service call centers, replacing human interaction with artificial voices.
“There are jokes going around in college: Your students’ AI systems will write essays and their professors’ AI systems will grade them,” he said.
This dark humor resonates with Seidel, who wants Wyoming’s AI initiative to be human-centered.
“I think a lot of people think it’s about machines and computers and data systems and so on,” he said. “We’re focused on how people use this.
“And we want to empower people to look through partnerships and through gifts that people can make to support our students and our faculty and then our partners. So it’s about training people and exploring how this can be used for good for the state.”
Future education
When Seidel leaves after six years at Old Main, he plans to stay in Laramie and teach at the university.
“I’m really proud of what we did,” he said. “So I plan to stay here as a professor for at least a while. And then hopefully I can be a good citizen and help the university or the state in any way I can.”
He is already outlining courses not on technical AI algorithms, but on “the future of computers or the future of universities.”
“I thought a lot about how it could be used and what impact it would have on research and higher education,” says Seidel. “I hope that we will turn this into a program that will actually help our students and our businesses and attract businesses to the state.”
For Kotthoff, who is now observing the evolution of AI outside of Wyoming, one key is maintaining perspective amid the hype and fanfare of AI’s rise.
When asked if he allowed AI to help him make career choices, Kotthoff laughed and joked, “I wouldn’t trust AI with that.”
David Madison can be reached at [email protected].
