I just found out something quite interesting about Jed McCaleb. The founder of Ripple and Stellar is seriously investing money into AGI, but not in the typical way you'd expect in crypto.

Through his institution, Astera Institute, McCaleb committed one billion dollars to develop artificial intelligence systems that truly work differently. His argument is solid: the Transformers that dominate now only make predictions, period. They lack planning, decision-making, or motivation capabilities. Basically, they are incomplete.

What caught my attention is his approach: going back to study how the human brain learns. It’s not about reinventing the wheel; it’s about understanding the original wheel. Jed McCaleb is betting that the right architecture for AGI must come from there, from how our neurons actually work.

They have already hired Dileep George, who came from DeepMind, to lead all the research. The plan is to expand the team to 30 researchers this year and publish the findings openly. That’s quite different from what other AI labs are doing.

But wait, there’s more. McCaleb invested another 600 million dollars into pure neuroscience research. We’re talking about implanting brain-machine interfaces in mice, monkeys, and eventually humans, to record how neurons activate and turn those patterns into new AI architectures.

It’s ambitious, no doubt. But coming from someone who already revolutionized two cryptocurrency ecosystems, McCaleb seems to be looking for his next big game in AGI. Interesting to see how crypto wealth is channeled into serious scientific research.