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How Peter Thiel’s Relationship With Eliezer Yudkowsky Launched the AI Revolution
The AI doomer and the AI boomer both created each other's monsters. An excerpt from "The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future."
Like Sam Altman, Peter Thiel had long been obsessed with the possibility that one day computers would become smarter than humans and unleash a self-reinforcing cycle of exponential technological progress, an old science fiction trope often referred to as “the singularity.” The term was first introduced by the mathematician and Manhattan Project adviser John von Neumann in the 1950s, and popularized by the acclaimed sci-fi author Vernor Vinge in the 1980s. By the time he was 17, he was painfully aware that he was not like other people, posting a web page declaring that he was a “genius” but “not a Nazi.” He rejected being defined as a “male teenager,” instead preferring to classify himself as an “Algernon,” a reference to the famous Daniel Keyes short story about a lab mouse who gains enhanced intelligence. In December 2013, Hassabis stood on stage at a machine-learning conference at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe and demonstrated DeepMind’s first big breakthrough: an AI agent that could learn to play and then quickly master the classic Atari video game Breakout without any instruction from humans.
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