Svmuu News Ripple and Stellar founder Jed McCaleb will invest $1 billion from his approximately $3.9 billion cryptocurrency fortune to develop an AGI system based on principles of the human brain through his non-profit organization, the Astera Institute. Additionally, he has separately pledged $600 million towards the field of neuroscience.
The Astera Institute, located in Emeryville, is currently planning to record neural activity patterns in mice performing tasks via brain-computer interfaces. The research findings will subsequently be translated into new AI architectures, with plans to expand the experimental subjects to monkeys and humans in the future. The institute's AGI project is led by former DeepMind executive Dileep George. The plan is to expand the lab to 30 researchers this year and to publicly publish the research results.
McCaleb believes that the current mainstream Transformer architecture only achieves the capability of prediction, lacking key elements such as planning, decision-making, and motivation, necessitating exploration of new directions. He stated that AI based on human brain principles is more likely to be understood and controlled by humans. Former Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun's new lab, AMI, recently completed a $1 billion seed funding round to advance research on "world models" in a similar direction. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman holds a different view, believing that achieving AGI requires multiple medium-scale breakthroughs rather than a single, entirely new direction.