In an age of artificial intelligence, the human kind is increasingly important
|Cambridge|10 min read
Ervin Macic was despondent. While in school he twice won medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and researched artificial intelligence, trying to speed up how models make predictions. He dreamed of one day joining an AI lab to make the technology safe. Yet the 19-year-old Bosnian prodigy was unable to take a place at the University of Oxford: its fees of £60,000 a year were five times his family’s annual income. So he went to the University of Sarajevo, where he sat programming exams on a decades-old computer.
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This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Spotting superstars”
From the September 27th 2025 edition
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