From: Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2014 3:21 PM To: Jeffrey Epstein Subject: Re: Al startup Vicarious secures $40 million in investment funding Hi, Yeah, I understand that to secure substantial funding for my work, it will likely be necessary to make an impressive demo, and we're working on it.... When I have such a demo, I will let you know. I think we should be able to come up with a nice "theory of mind" demo this year, using our Al game world as a basis. (The "deception agent" we discussed would be a part of this.) .... This may not be as headline-grabbing as solving CAPTCHAs but will form a much sounder basis for further work toward real AGI.... Indeed, perhaps Dileep made a wiser choice than me in terms of rapid securing of funding. I make no claim to be a genius of fundraising or scientific or tech-industry politics... On the other hand, I believe my approach has led me to understand the problem better. I have always been driven more by understanding than by money; which is probably associated with why I have a lot more understanding than money ;-p Dileep put a lot of resources on solving CAPTCHA, which was a very cool demo. In the course of doing this, he did not build his understanding of the broader AGI problem; but he created something that was broadly viewed as proving the validity of his approach, which enabled him to raise a lot of money... Similarly, Demis Hassabis put a lot of resources on making a system that could learn to play simple video games using computer vision and reinforcement learning. This is basically a bunch of fiddling-around and tuning of known algorithms, which did not impress any of the world's reinforcement learning / vision experts particularly; but it did blow Larry Page away and got Demis a fat acquisition for Deep Mind. Good for Demis! ;) I have worked on many aspects of the AGI problem at once, rather than focusing on pushing one corner of the solution to an impressively demo-able state; which has ma