On a Mission to Create AGI: To Boost Human Flourishing
My Journey
How did I end up dedicating most of the last 30 years to AGI?
I was born in East Germany, but luckily my parents fled to West Berlin just before The Wall was built. My adventurous stepdad motivated us to move to South Africa when I was 12 — what a change! It exposed me to a much more open ‘can do’ culture.
For ‘domestic’ reasons I was on my own and started work at 16 — bank clerk, motorcycle shop, fast food, and then something more satisfying: an entry-level job as an electrician for a standby-power company. Worked my way up to a position of electronics engineer in their UPS division.
At 21 I took off 10 months to go overland from South Africa to Kenya, and then India to England via VW bus and motorcycle. Spent quite a bit of time studying philosophy and psychology.
After a few more years as design engineer I started my own little industrial electronics company. Working with microprocessors made me fall in love with programming, so my company quickly turned into a software startup developing a comprehensive ERP suite for SMB. I loved (and still do) designing and writing software: from machine code, to writing assemblers, DBs, programming languages and more from scratch!
My company rapidly grew from the garage to a 400-person enterprise (Ohio Group Ltd) to an IPO on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. That was awesome! (Even though I made some colossal mistakes along the way).
We sold ‘Ohio’ to a larger listed company and by 1993 I found myself retired. After a year of reading, dating, and scuba diving I reawakened my early interest in ‘thinking machines’ and their fantastic potential to enhance human flourishing. And so I embarked on a 5-year journey of studying all aspects of intelligence: epistemology, philosophy, psychometrics, cognitive and developmental psychology, animal intelligence, neuroscience, and of course everything AI. This culminated in a design and plan for a ‘thinking machine’.
By 2001 I was firmly established in Los Angeles and ready to turn my ideas into reality. Unfortunately, due to South African currency restrictions plus me unwisely betting again the dot.com bubble lasting as long as it did, my wealth had dwindled significantly. Still, I managed to get together a team of about 10 engineers to help build some initial prototypes.
The next year I came across a few like-minded AI developers and we decided to write a book about recapturing the original vision of human-like AI. For this, three of us ended up coining the term ‘AGI’ or ‘Artificial General Intelligence’.
Experimentation and development continued till 2006 when we, on the one hand, had enough technology to start commercializing, and on the other needed to make money…
The next way-too-many years were spent building a commercial IVR company based on our core ‘proto-AGI’ technology. Most of the effort involved fund raising, recruiting a much larger team, sales and marketing, building data centers, developing and integrating voice technology, and making the system reliable and scalable.
I only managed to extricate myself from the commercial side around 2012 and soon started a new AGI development company that is now Aigo.ai. Starting with a new 10-person team, and building on everything learned over the past 12 years, we developed our next generation cognitive engine. By 2016 we had powerful live demos of an ‘Elder Companion’ and an ‘Alexa Killer’. This success led us to launch our highly effective commercial product in 2021, ‘Aigo: Chatbot with a brain’.
So with this as a proof point, in late 2023 we started on our next major push to enhance our technology to full human-level AGI. Our approach overcomes the inherent limitations of Statistical/ Generative AI and does not suffer hallucinations or require millions to train. We have an experienced team of about a dozen ‘AI psychologists’ and engineers focusing on AGI, and are very actively looking to significantly expand and accelerate or effort. We are drawing on many years of prior experience and have a detailed roadmap to achieve our goal in a few short years!