The founders of Ripple and Stellar have invested $1 billion to develop AGI by studying the mechanisms of the human brain.

Ripple and Stellar founder Jed McCaleb will invest $1 billion from his approximately $3.9 billion cryptocurrency fortune to develop an AGI system based on the principles of the human brain through his nonprofit organization, the Astera Institute. He has also pledged an additional $600 million to neuroscience. The Emeryville-based Astera Institute plans to record neural activity patterns in mice performing tasks using brain-computer interfaces, then translate the research findings into novel AI architectures, with future experiments planned to expand to monkeys and humans. Led by former DeepMind executive Dileep George, the institute's AGI project plans to expand its lab to 30 researchers this year and publicly publish its findings. McCaleb believes that current mainstream Transformer architectures only achieve predictive capabilities, lacking key elements such as planning, decision-making, and motivation, necessitating the exploration of new directions. He states that AI based on the principles of the human brain is more likely to be understood and controlled by humans. Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, recently completed a $1 billion seed funding round for his new lab, AMI, to advance research in a similar direction of "world modeling." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, however, holds a different view, believing that the realization of AGI requires multiple medium-sized breakthroughs, rather than a single entirely new direction.