What I will remember most clearly about this summit was Peter Thiel. Firstly, the pre-summit party at his penthouse apartment. That was a treat: a tiny peak into the world of the ultra-rich. His mix of intelligence, focus and energy was quite something to behold and he left a real impression on me. His talk was also among the most engaging in my opinion. No slides, no fluffy stuff, just a straight delivery of ideas and analysis seemingly off the cuff with no notes. In his talk and comments afterwards, the main thing that stuck in my mind was his concern that the singularity wouldn’t arrive quickly enough. Really?

I don’t understand this. If this is really his main concern, why isn’t he using at least a tiny part of his huge financial resources to try to make it happen sooner? He’s funding SIAI, but they aren’t exactly trying to make the singularity happen sooner. If time frame is his primary concern, and I can’t see any reason why he would say this if it were not the case (it’s easier to think of reasons why he wouldn’t) why the inactivity? Just a few percent of his wealth spread across a handful of small projects over the next few decades would make a night-and-day difference to funding in this area. There is essentially no money available to do AGI research and thus we spend our time working on the related topics in the areas of machine learning and theoretical/computational neuroscience that actually are funded. I guess he’s thought carefully about this, but at least I can’t see how his actions can be consistent with his stated beliefs.

Many of the other talks I’d heard before. In some cases so many times I’m sure I could give them myself. I hadn’t heard about the work of Gregory Benford before where they are breeding up very long lived flies and then, if I understand correctly, looking at how the different bio-chemical pathways in these flies change to produce long life. As humans share many of these pathways, they then make pills that reproduce some of these effects in humans in the hope that we too will live longer. I don’t know enough biology to be able to comment further, but it sounds like an interesting long-shot idea to at least try. I guess it will be some time before we know whether it has any effect.

As per my last summit, the most interesting thing for me was meeting and talking to people one on one, or in small groups. I ended up giving my 20 minute spiel on what I consider to be the most promising approach to AGI at least 10 times. It was quite positively received — I’d expected it to be a harder sell. Many of these people seemed to be revising their expectations after talking to me. One exception, and a person I was especially interested in talking to, was Moshe Looks from Google Research. He strikes me as a pretty sharp and temperate thinker who also has a fair amount of hands on experience working on AI/AGI both academically and commercially. Strangely, we seemed agreed on just about everything regarding which approaches were the most promising, in what degrees and why. I was more bullish on the time line for developments, but not radically so. If I add an extra 50% to my time line, which historically appears to be my degree of miscalibration when forecasting technology developments, then we even come up with the same time estimates. Given that I’ve only met him once before, I found this degree of agreement between us quite striking.

My other impression was the scale of the summit this time: over 800 people which I think was roughly twice the size of the last summit. There also seemed to be a more diverse group attending. Along with the usual mix of geeks, nerds and all too obvious Aspergers cases, there seemed to be more general public interest as far as I could tell. I think the gender ratio might have improved too, indeed there was even a fair number of attractive young women. Year by year, is the singularity idea slowly starting to go mainstream? Perhaps it is and I suspect this summit is one of the driving forces. Well done.