In an excerpt from The Optimist, journalist Keach Hagey details how Peter Thiel’s investments, guided by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s AI visions, seeded innovations like DeepMind and catalyzed OpenAI’s emergence through strategic mentorship and network support.

Key points

• DeepMind’s Atari Breakout agent uses deep neural networks and reinforcement learning to achieve human-level performance without supervision.
• Yudkowsky’s Singularity Institute pioneered friendly AI research, introducing alignment frameworks like Coherent Extrapolated Volition.
• Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund investment in DeepMind and connections with Y Combinator catalyzed the creation of AGI ventures such as OpenAI.

Why it matters: This historical insight underscores the pivotal role of vision-driven funding networks in shaping the trajectory of artificial general intelligence research and entrepreneurial ecosystems.