When now outgoing University of Wyoming President Ed Seidel wanted to test a new artificial intelligence system fed with data about university regulations, he posed what seemed like a straightforward question: Does the president have to take care of a horse if it comes to Prexy's Pasture?
Prexy's Pasture is the name of a popular grassy area on campus. And yes, at the University of Wyoming, horse care is a designated presidential duty.
“That's, like, in the regulations," Seidel said. "And I assumed it was an easy test. But it actually said ‘no.’ I'm like, ‘What? No?’
"And then it explained, because the president has the authority to delegate that duty to anyone on campus. And so it was really sophisticated in its answer."
The AI system, developed by computer science professor Lars Kotthoff using open-source large language models plugged into all the university's regulations, had found truth in what had become a campus urban legend.
More significantly, it showed how artificial intelligence could reach into every corner of a university’s operations and glean insights.
Now, as Seidel prepares to step down from the presidency at the end of the 2026 spring semester and Kotthoff is on sabbatical in Paris before taking a position at St. Andrews — the oldest university in Scotland — the pair says 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 winds down his presidency, Seidel continues to champion AI development across the state and sees the technology's emergence as part of a long arc, stretching back to the 1950s, around the time he was born.
But when chatbots hit the scene about three years ago, everything accelerated — in commerce, creativity and across college campuses.
"It was astonishing what they could do," Seidel said. "And so, we immediately had working groups to start looking at it and really realized we need to bring 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 commitments from donors and industry matched 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 across energy, agriculture, health care and more, we are empowering our students, faculty, communities and industries to thrive in an AI-driven future."
The money came after a thoughtful approach from state legislators, Seidel said.
"‘Well, let's give you $2.5 million, with the requirement that it be matched with non-public funding, to just sort of see what you can do with that,’” he said the Legislature’s message was. "And so our idea was 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 could be used to support their business or their industry."
The response from Wyoming companies was enthusiastic across the board, he said.
"I don't think there was a single company that we spoke to that wasn't enthusiastic about working with us," Seidel said. "And so I hope this is just the beginning to grow our impact on the state and our partnerships with companies. So I'm very optimistic about that."
One particularly promising partnership involves Safran, a French aerospace company.
"They anticipate bringing in as many as 200 staff members in the next couple of years," Seidel said. "And they're very interested in applying AI technologies to their entertainment systems that they make for airline companies — Boeing and Airbus and so on."
Resistance
The academic world's initial reaction to AI tools like ChatGPT has often been defensive, Seidel acknowledged, with faculty groups focusing on how to prevent students from cheating.
"Let's just say it's obviously a very disruptive technology," he said. "And so there are going to be lots of reactions."
Like the technology itself, humans — especially students — are constantly gathering new input, building on information bit by bit and growing a knowledge base.
“In the old days, I remember when calculators came out and they were forbidden in classrooms because you're supposed to be able to do long division,” said Seidel. “But does anyone really need to do that anymore?"
Now, like calculators, AI should be accessible to all students, said Siedel, regardless of their economic circumstances.
"We are looking at developing in-house models, and we are playing with them, and we're also looking at licenses that we might pay for with companies like OpenAI or with Google and others," he said. "And so we're still negotiating that and looking at what would be the best.
"But we want to bring these tools to everybody, whether they can afford them or not."
The imperative is clear, Seidel said.
"If you don't have access to it, you're going to be disadvantaged," he said. "And I'm thinking particularly about two different things.
"I want our students to have the training that they need to enter the workforce. And increasingly, that's going to be absolutely required for them."
Seidel sees more faculty becoming more fluent in AI "so that they're able to advance their research or use it in the classroom more effectively, or to be more competitive in getting external funding.”
Scotland Bound
Kotthoff, who served as an associate professor at UW from 2017 through September , used a homegrown visual when explaining the playing field for AI these days.
When it comes to the generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude, which dominate the headlines, in Kotthoff’s analogy those are like the town of Jackson.
That’s because Jackson is flashy, attractive to investors and it’s not representative of the rest of Wyoming.
Kotthoff tells his classes that beyond the spotlight trained on ChatGPT and Claude, there is "good old-fashioned AI" — approaches that provide provable solutions to complex problems and aren’t as sexy as a chatbot but might accelerate growth across Wyoming’s economy.
Kotthoff works on symbolic reasoning and optimization problems, the kind where he said humans armed with AI can prove a solution is correct, unlike ChatGPT's sometimes confident but completely wrong answers.
"That answer is completely incorrect and not even a tiny little bit correct, but it is really confident that this 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 salesperson problem, where you need to find the most efficient route through multiple cities.
The promise is dramatic efficiency, including on campus.
"It potentially goes from taking a year of student time to being able to do it in maybe an hour or two with the help of a large language model,” he said. "I would really like to see Wyoming do more of that, and in particular the University of Wyoming driving that, because that's kind of 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 across disciplines in different departments to really apply these state-of-the-art AI techniques in other areas to solve the interesting problems there," he said, describing a "virtuous circle" where applying AI in other fields leads to improvements that then enhance AI methods themselves.
Lessons From The Last Tech Revolution
For Seidel, watching AI's emergence brings a sense of déjà vu.
As a research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, he witnessed the rise of internet legend Marc Andreessen and the birth of the web browser.
"I knew him as an undergraduate student with this kind of very cool project, you know, the Mosaic web browser," Seidel said.
In 1993, Seidel was part of a group that traveled to Apple Computer trying 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 the Internet Explorer. So there was a missed opportunity for Apple right there."
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 fast-food drive-thrus and customer service call centers, replacing human interaction with artificial voices.
"There are jokes going around the university: 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 people-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 do people use this.
"And we want to empower people to be able to look through partnerships and through gifts that people might 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 Teaching
When Seidel leaves after six years in Old Main, he plans to remain in Laramie and teach at the university.
"I'm really proud of what we've done," he said. "So I intend to just stay here for at least for a while as a professor. And then hopefully I can be a good citizen to help the university or the state in whatever way I can."
He's already sketching out courses, not on technical AI algorithms, but on "the future of computing or the future of universities."
"I thought a lot about how it might be used and how it's going to impact research and higher education," Seidel said. "I hope we'll turn this into a program that will actually help our students, our companies, and attract companies to the state.”
For Kotthoff, now observing AI's evolution outside 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 quipped, "I wouldn't trust AI with that.”
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
