It would be hard to overstate the impact that Peter Thiel has had on the career of Sam Altman. After Altman sold his first startup in 2012, Thiel bankrolled his first venture fund, Hydrazine Capital. Thiel saw Altman as an inveterate optimist who stood at "the absolute epicenter, maybe not of Silicon Valley, but of a Silicon Valley zeitgeist." As Thiel put it, "If you had to look for the one person who represented a millennial tech person, it would be Altman." Each year, Altman would point Thiel toward the most promising startup at Y Combinator–Airbnb in 2012, Stripe in 2013, Zenefits in 2014–and Thiel would swallow hard and invest, even though he sometimes felt like he was being swept up in a hype cycle.

The 76-year-old scientist and engineer has spent much of his time on earth arguing that humans can not only take advantage of yet-to-be-invented medical advances to live longer, but also ultimately merge with machines, become hyperintelligent, and stick around indefinitely. Just minutes before we met, we both learned that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist and one of Kurzweil's intellectual jousting partners, had suffered that fate. A few days before that, the science fiction author Vernor Vinge had also passed. Vinge's novels first described the singularity, that moment when superintelligent AI surpasses what humans can do and mere mortals need high-tech augmentation themselves to remain relevant. Kurzweil embraced the name for his own grand vision, and in 2005 wrote a best-selling book called The Singularity Is Near.

On Wednesday, author David Brin announced that Vernor Vinge, sci-fi author, former professor, and father of the technological singularity concept, died from Parkinson's disease at age 79 on March 20, 2024, in La Jolla, California. The announcement came in a Facebook tribute where Brin wrote about Vinge's deep love for science and writing. "A titan in the literary genre that explores a limitless range of potential destinies, Vernor enthralled millions with tales of plausible tomorrows, made all the more vivid by his polymath masteries of language, drama, characters, and the implications of science," wrote Brin in his post. As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004).

AI is still in the foothills of its adoption S-curve, and I love this period of any new technology – the scope of what it can do is unknown, so the main job is to stretch the imagination and try out things. Anyway, the tech am I digging recently is a software framework called LangChain (here are the docs) which does something pretty straightforward: it makes it easy to call OpenAI's GPT, say, a dozen times in a loop to answer a single question, and mix in queries to Wikipedia and other databases. This is a big deal because of a technique called ReAct from a paper out of Princeton and Google Research (the ReAct website links to the Nov 2022 paper, sample code, etc). ReAct looks innocuous but here's the deal: instead of asking GPT to simply do smart-autocomplete on your text, you prompt it to respond in a thought/act/observation loop. Thought: Let's think step by step.

As we continue to make strides in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), one concept that has been gaining momentum is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Unlike traditional AI systems, AGI aims to replicate the human-like ability to learn, reason and adapt in any given situation. In other words, AGI seeks to create a machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human can do. This level of sophistication is still far from being achieved, but experts predict that once we create AGI, it will be a major turning point in human history, with implications far beyond what we can currently imagine. In this article, we'll dive into what experts are saying about AGI and what it could mean for the future of humanity.

If you're getting tired of hearing that "strong AI" is just around the corner, you're not alone. The Stephen Hawkings, Ray Kurzweils, and Elon Musks of the world have been putting humanity on notice with predictions of machines overtaking humans for decades. And every time they're issued, the media jumps on them, because being on the cusp of a new era of intelligent beings is news. What's missing from these confident claims, however, is a realistic assessment of the problems that rank-and-file computer scientists wrestle with every day -- namely, the problem of intelligence. In their single-minded zeal, the futurists assume that a bridge exists between narrow applications of AI and the general intelligence humans possess.

If you're getting tired of hearing that "strong AI" is just around the corner, you're not alone. The Stephen Hawkings, Ray Kurzweils, and Elon Musks of the world have been putting humanity on notice with predictions of machines overtaking humans for decades. And every time they're issued, the media jumps on them, because being on the cusp of a new era of intelligent beings is news. What's missing from these confident claims, however, is a realistic assessment of the problems that rank-and-file computer scientists wrestle with every day -- namely, the problem of intelligence. In their single-minded zeal, the futurists assume that a bridge exists between narrow applications of AI and the general intelligence humans possess.

A subreddit committed to intelligent understanding of the hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence progresses to the point of greater-than-human intelligence, radically changing civilization. This community studies the creation of superintelligence-- and predict it will happen in the near future, and that ultimately, deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the Singularity benefits humanity. The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence. Because the capabilities of such an intelligence may be difficult for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is often seen as an occurrence (akin to a gravitational singularity) beyond which the future course of human history is unpredictable or even unfathomable. The first use of the term "singularity" in this context was by mathematician John von Neumann.

If the experts are to be believed, AI will develop its own consciousness. A closer look suggests they got it backwards – human consciousness will be embedded in AI. What kind of consciousness will Chinese AI reveal? Philosophers have traditionally debated consciousness along two lines: Plato, Descartes, and modern neuroscience claim that the brain produces consciousness and that it is the result of biological evolution. On the other hand, Indian philosophy, as well as Aristotle and some of those working in quantum physics, argue that consciousness is intrinsic to the universe and that it preceded life. The closest Chinese equivalent to the Western word consciousness is xin, literally "heart-mind." In the Chinese view, xin does not develop naturally but must be cultivated. Xin is rooted in Confucianism, which means it has an ethical connotation. A closer look at xin may shed light on how the Chinese will develop AI, and whether it leads to artificial consciousness.

Regardless of how artificial intelligence (AI) is defined, there is little doubt that this resource can be of great value, especially in big data applications. Undoubtedly, AI is fast becoming a major technological tool for prescriptive analytics, the step beyond predictive analytics that helps us determine how to implement and/or optimize optimal decisions. In business applications, it can assess future risks, quantify probabilities and in so doing, give us insights how to improve market penetration, customer satisfaction, security analysis, trade execution, fraud detection and prevention, while proving indispensable in land and air traffic control, national security and defence. There are also a host of healthcare applications such as patient-specific treatments for diseases and illnesses. Recently, the popular concept of "Singularity" was perceived by computer scientists.