Odaily Planet Daily reports that Jed McCaleb, founder of Ripple and Stellar, will invest $1 billion from his approximately $3.9 billion cryptocurrency wealth through his nonprofit organization, the Astera Institute, to develop an AGI system based on principles of the human brain. Additionally, he has pledged another $600 million to the field of neuroscience.
The Astera Institute, located in Emeryville, is currently planning to record neural activity patterns in mice as they perform tasks via brain-machine interfaces, then translate these findings into novel AI architectures; the experimental subjects will later expand to monkeys and humans. The institute’s AGI project, led by former DeepMind executive Dileep George, aims to grow the lab to 30 researchers this year and publicly release its research findings.
McCaleb believes that current mainstream Transformer architectures only achieve prediction capabilities and lack essential elements such as planning, decision-making, and motivation, necessitating exploration of new directions. He states that AI based on principles of the human brain is more likely to be understood and controlled by humans. Yann LeCun, former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, recently completed a $1 billion seed round for his new lab, AMI, to advance research into "world models" in a similar direction. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman holds a different view, arguing that achieving AGI requires multiple medium-sized breakthroughs rather than a single entirely new direction.