Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World

“The basic premise of transhumanism is that the human race is currently second-rate. With the right scientific discoveries and technology, we might one day evolve beyond our physical and mental limits into a new, more intelligent species. We’ll be smarter and more creative, and we’ll live longer. We might even manage to meld our minds with computers and explore the galaxy.”

“Hassabis would later say that games were like a gym for the mind and chess was the ultimate workout.”

“As his travels drew to a close, Altman started an early-stage investment firm called Hydrazine Capital to make financial bets on start-ups, from life sciences to education software companies. He drew on his connections with some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful financiers.”

“you wanted to conduct scientific research on a disease like Alzheimer’s, you could go to a university on the East Coast or in Europe. But if you wanted to reverse aging, you went to Silicon Valley.”

“If you have a very large dataset and a very large neural network, success is guaranteed,” Sutskever said at one AI conference.”

“I think one reason why chess has survived so successfully over generations is because the knight and bishop are perfectly balanced,” Hassabis told Thiel as canapés were being passed around. “I think that causes all the creative asymmetric tension.”

“We need to get there before the AI takes over,” he told engineers in 2023, according to his biographer Ashlee Vance. “We want to get there with a maniacal sense of urgency. Maniacal.” Musk believes that with brain implants, humans will be able to prevent a future artificial superintelligence from wiping us out, and so he wants Neuralink to perform surgeries on more than 22,000 people by 2030.”

“As he looked around the room at the other chess geniuses hunched over their boards, neurons churning, it dawned on him that this whole tournament was a waste of brainpower.”

“If you throw a smartphone at a group of people sitting inside the exclusive Battery Club in San Francisco, it’ll hit at least three trying to save the world.”