TechFlow News, March 27: According to a Forbes report, Jed McCaleb—founder of Ripple and Stellar, and a cryptocurrency billionaire—has pledged $1 billion through his nonprofit Astera Institute to develop artificial intelligence systems inspired by the human brain, with the goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). McCaleb argues that today’s dominant Transformer architecture is limited to the single function of “prediction,” lacking critical capabilities such as planning, decision-making, and motivation; thus, AI research must return to studying how the human brain learns.
The Astera Institute has hired Dileep George, former DeepMind executive, to lead its AGI research initiative. The institute plans to expand its research team to 30 scientists this year and will publicly release its findings. Additionally, McCaleb has pledged an extra $600 million for neuroscience research—including implanting brain-computer interfaces in mice, monkeys, and even humans—to record neural activity patterns and translate them into novel AI architectures.
