A Spymaster Sheikh Controls a 1.5 Trillion Fortune. He Wants to Use It to Dominate AI

For a while in the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized box in Abu Dhabi was considered the greatest chess player in the world. Its name was Hydra, and it was a small super-computer--a cabinet full of industrial-grade processors and specially designed chips, strung together with fiber-optic cables and jacked into the internet. At a time when chess was still the main gladiatorial arena for competition between humans and AI, Hydra and its exploits were briefly the stuff of legend. The New Yorker published a contemplative 5,000-word feature about its emergent creativity; WIRED declared Hydra "fearsome"; and chess publications covered its victories with the violence of wrestling commentary. Hydra, they wrote, was a "monster machine" that "slowly strangled" human grand masters.