“Stop it,” said James.

“Everyone’s afraid that AI will suddenly wake up, get upset and take over the world. Or that AI will wake up and take all of our jobs. This will happen. But without the ‘wake up’ part.”

For years… even decades… James has been debunking myths about artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, those myths have only gotten more popular.

They’ve spurred questions like:

"Will artificial intelligence ever become self-aware?"

"Can artificial intelligence have emotions?"

"Could AI surpass human intelligence?"

"Could AI turn against us?"

That’s in part why James has begun writing his Machine Intelligence Series.

Below, you’ll find part one, where James reveals his (little-known) history working with AI.

Before you go there, though, James has an important announcement along this very vein. 

Long story short…

James believes a tiny AI company could be on the verge of an explosive rise in stock price. And if he’s right? Early investors stand to make a mint.

In this short video, James reveals all of his research on this company… why this buyout could be imminent… and how to get started.

The catch? This announcement is time-sensitive.

Click here for everything you need to know. (Before it’s too late.)

And read on.

How AI is About to Change Your Life

James Altucher

AI is everywhere nowadays, from the personalized social media recommendations we receive to the helpful chatbots guiding us through customer service calls. I've been curious about AI and its ability to learn and think like humans. However, as I've learned more about AI, I've realized that it's not just a sci-fi concept, it's changing the world we live in.

As I started to incorporate AI into my work, I began to see both its benefits and challenges. AI can make tasks easier and provide valuable insights, but there are also ethical and privacy concerns to consider. As AI becomes even smarter, it's essential that we have honest conversations about its impact on society and how we can ensure it's used for good.

In this article, I'll discuss my experience with AI and how it has affected my life. I'll share some of the ups and downs of working with this technology, and how it has made me reflect on the world around me. I hope to give you a better understanding of what AI is and why it's worth paying attention to. So, let's dive in and explore the world of AI!

…

I didn’t write that.

I asked chatGPT to write me an intro to this month’s article.

At first it was too formal, so I said “Hey chatGPT! Write this again, but make it more casual.”

Seconds later it spit out something much more my style. But it was too long, so I said “write this again, but make it shorter!”

The end result is what you see above, not perfect, but that took me a total of 10 seconds — not bad!

It’s not totally wrong about what I’ve learned so far when it comes to AI and how I’m using it in various projects I’m involved with.

I’m sure you’re seeing where this is going by now. AI isn’t about to change everything, it’s already here.

And I don’t want to scare you…

But it’s immeasurably important that you know everything you can about what’s already here, and what’s coming next.

I’ve been saying I wanted to write to you about AI in more detail.

So today we’re starting what I’m going to call the Machine Intelligence Series.

It all starts with a guy called Kai-Fu Lee…

My AI Origin Story

I decided to visit Kai-Fu Lee at CMU to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.

CMU was the one graduate school that accepted me back in 1989. And by “accepted me” I was thinking not only of academic studies but my parents and everyone I had ever known. Until then I had been lonely but now this place actually wanted me and I was insecure that their wanting was justified.

So I visited.

I was in Kai-Fu Lee’s lab and he said, “It will understand anything you say. As long as you say something that could be considered a command on a Navy Destroyer ship.”

The government had funded him. I forget the first words ever understood by a computer but it had something to do with killing people far away.

Kai-Fu Lee ended up developing what became Siri for Apple before he went to work at Microsoft and then Google and then went to China where he became the largest venture capitalist there.

Recently he came on my podcast and described how he beat cancer and what AI might mean to us in the future.

(30 years after first meeting Kai-Fu)

He co-wrote the science fiction book of stories AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future with a great science fiction writer, Chen Qiufan.

The first story was about a girl getting insurance. The insurance company used AI to read all of her emails and texts. And because she was getting into an interracial relationship and apparently there were statistics about this sort of thing, the AI of the insurance company decided her entire family needed to pay higher insurance premiums.

This is one of the dangers of AI.

Deep Blue

A few years later IBM made a mistake and tried to offer me a job. I helped them correct their mistake by turning it down.

They wanted me to work on “Deep Blue” the AI computer that eventually beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.

I had worked briefly on an earlier version of Deep Blue, when it was called “ChipTest” and later called “Deep Thought”. Before IBM got involved.

I had an idea to improve it that they wanted me to work on.

A chess program builds a tree of moves. Say you have 10 possible moves, and the opponent has ten possible moves to each of those moves (so now the computer has to look at 100 moves), and so on. Computers could look 20, 30, 100 moves deep.

I said, “in the tree of moves, let the players make two moves in a row. If, after making two moves in a row, the player is winning then you know the first move was an important threat and you can focus on that move before all of the others. This would speed up the computer.”

Speed is very important to AI.

They didn’t really need me to implement the idea and they did it and then beat the world champion. I’m not saying it was my idea that helped Deep Blue beat the human world chess champion but 20 years later, when I told Garry of my role in Deep Blue, there might have been a flicker of disgust in his eyes bringing back some memory. 

20 years after Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess, here is Kasparov beating me:

altucher.io/kasparov

My Hedge Fund Strategy

A decade later I was eating lunch at a men’s only club on Park Avenue in NYC.

I was trying to explain my hedge fund strategy to an older guy who was thinking of investing. He had somehow been involved in Enron but also not involved so he was free to enjoy his wealth.

“My software looks for patterns in the market that are statistically significant,” I said. “Like, it will notice that the past 20 times Microsoft had a bad earnings report and then went down three days in a row, on the fourth day it always goes up. It has 1000s of patterns like that that it discovered in the data. Then I have another piece of software that simply waits for a pattern to show up and then makes the trade at the critical moment.”

“It’s like artificial intelligence,” he said.

“Yes.”

He didn’t invest.

The guy who introduced us called me up to tell me why. “He said to me, ‘It’s interesting but it’s one of those things that will keep working until suddenly it doesn’t.’”

A few years later I wrote a book, Trade Like a Hedge Fund, where I revealed about 20 of the patterns. They all stopped working after the book came out.

This is a limitation of AI.

Looking Forward

As you can see from some of these stories, I’ve known about and been involved in aspects of AI for a long time. Heck, a huge part of my career is based around it!

There are dangers and limitations associated with AI, but there are also HUGE reasons to embrace this technology and everything that’s coming down the pike because of it.

That’s why I decided to dive into this Machine Intelligence Series with you…

To talk about what AI is, how it works, how we can use it, and so much more.

This is one of my favorite topics and I can’t wait to get into this more with you over the next couple of months as we continue this series!