By the rich founder of Mt. Gox and Ripple, Jed McCaleb.
Obelisk is the Artificial General Intelligence laboratory at Astera. We are focused on the following problems: How does an agent continuously adapt to a changing environment and incorporate new information? In a complicated stochastic environment with sparse rewards, how does an agent associate rewards with the correct set of actions that led to those rewards? How does higher level planning arise?
Marek Rosa's play thing.
Video 1. AI Game - LLM-driven NPCs that can talk by Marek Rosa (2023) Source. Not the most amazing demo, but the idea is there. Seems to be a preview for AI People. The previous working title seems to have been AI Odyssey.
It is a bit hard to decide if those people are serious or not. Sometimes it feels scammy, but sometimes it feels fun and right!
Particularly concerning is the fact that they are not a not-for-profit entity, and it is hard to understand how they might make money.
Charles Simon, the founder, is pretty focused in how natural neurons work vs artificial neural network models. He has some good explanations of that, and one major focus of the project is their semi open source spiking neuron simulator BrainSimII. While Ciro Santilli believe sthat there might be insight in that, he also has doubts if certain modules of the brain wouldn't be more suitable coded direclty in regular programming languages with greater ease and performance.
FutureAI appears to be Charles' retirement for fun project, he is likely independenty wealthy. Well done.
Video 1. Creativity and AGI by Charles Simon's at AGI-22 (2022) Source. Sounds OK!
Video 2. Machine Learning Is Not Like Your Brain by Future AI (2022) Source. Contains some BrainSimII demos.
The video from futureai.guru/technologies/brian-simulator-ii-open-source-agi-toolkit/ shows a demo of the possibly non open source version. They have a GUI neuron viewer and editor, which is kind of cool.
Video 1. Machine Learning Is Not Like Your Brain by Charles Simon (2022) Source.
Not having a manipulator claw is a major issue with this one.
But they also have a co-simulation focus, which is a bit of a win.
Basically it looks like the dude got enough money after selling some companies, and now he's doing cooler stuff without much need of money. Not bad.