A special note about one of my role models
DeepSeek was funded by a quant billionaire. Another Chinese billionaire funding another foundational project at the intersection of human memory and AI.
DeepSeek was funded by quant billionaire Liang Wenfeng. As I explained before, there was no state funding, nor was there any VC backing. I even wrote last week that had there been VC funding, DeepSeek wouldn’t have succeeded.
All there is is just pure dedication and pure self-funding for an open-source project that creates an outsized impact on humanity.
I increasingly believe Liang is not alone, but only an example of a new generation of billionaires trying to live a meaningful life after achieving great material success.
Almost 3 decades ago, Chen Tianqiao founded Shanda Group. If you were around at the time, you would remember that Shanda used to be China's most profitable video gaming company, even more successful than Tencent and NetEase.
But as early as 2014, way before China's true internet bubble, Shanda Group sold the lucrative game business and left that space for good, shocking everyone at the time.
And then, just like that, Mr. Chen faded away from the limelight, but that's when I really started to pay attention to him.
Because he found his true calling. After suffering from neurotic disorders, Mr. Chen decided to devote the rest of his life to supporting cutting-edge research for understanding human consciousness and founded the CalTech-based Tianqiao & Chrissy Chen Institute (TCCI) with a billion-dollar donation.
I think I have never said it publicly until now, but how human consciousness is formed and why we exist as we are, are the most important non-professional questions I study daily. (I might even start a newsletter about this topic one day.)
This is because, at age ~15, I started to have a deep existential crisis, questioning the meaning of life and the meaning of death. In my 20s, after reading enough about the subject (especially with the help of Douglas Hofstadter’s great works), I started to realize that the question of life and death is essentially a question of consciousness. It’s a question about what “I” means, thus starting my fascination with everything related to brain science.
Naturally, I was intrigued by Mr. Chen’s bold decision for his life and have been following TCCI's newsletter for many years. Ever since then, I have seen Mr. Chen as my role model, quite different from “just another businessman.”
Fast forward to today, large language models are hitting an observable bottleneck. GPT and DeepSeek are wonderful tools for general research about information accessible from the public internet, but internal knowledge (both personal and corporate) is still beyond reach, making it still a tantalizing big step away from AI’s true potential of unlocking productivity gains.
The LLMs don't seem able to be customizable, and they are not able to adapt to various changes on the go for each individual and each company.
The LLMs seem not to possess...memory.
But without memory, both long-term and temporary memory, there will be no true intelligence.
Just like neural networks and transformers drew inspiration from human brains, can AI also draw inspiration from how human memories are formed?
The idea sounds very intuitive, but nobody has proved it yet. This is why when I found out a Shanda-backed project called Tanka is drawing inspiration from the cutting-edge frontier of brain research to build an instant messaging tool with AI long-term memory, I was instantly intrigued and tried out for the team. I also approached the Tanka team, if just for an opportunity to showcase this latest project backed by one of my role models.
That’s why I am taking this special note to encourage you to check out the detail-packed interview below between the Baiguan team and @KissonL, a contagious serial entrepreneur, parttime sci-fi writer, and the CEO of Tanka, and Dr. Lidong Bing, chief scientist at Shanda AI Research Institute, to see how Tanka achieves this remarkable feat:
My background is in psychology and I have an interest in the interface between our humanity and our technology. The research in developing AI “memory” is exciting in that it is forcing us to look deeply into the processes which form what we call “consciousness” and examine many of the misconceptions and cultural perceptions we have accumulated over eons. This new research is forcing us to re-examine our concept of consciousness and to scientifically develop a roadmap of all the processes that somehow are sorted and combined to form a consensus we call consciousness.
Thomas Moore wrote a series of books on “Care of the Soul”. What I find lacking in AI is it’s stark “soulessmess.” Moore defines “soul” as the messy interface between our powers of reasoning and of sensing and experiencing. I remember the old computer term “fuzzy logic” which were early attempts to bridge the gap between machine logic and the ‘hot mess’ of human consciousness. It seems that dynamic is now being fully explored.
Can our machines help us to ironically become more human and less machine-like? Jacob Bronowski wrote a book and hosted an enlightening BBC series, “The Ascent of Man”, documenting how advances in technology have vastly altered human psychology and sociology. We have evolved to become more “machine-like” as mastering new technologies gave individuals and societies power and wealth. It seems in the process, we have sacrificed our humanity for the power of technology resulting in a plague of diseases of despair - depression, drug addiction, and suicide. Can we relearn from our technology as it better mimics our humanity to again honor and respect the wonder of our illogical humanity? Or, will we plunge ourselves into even deeper collective despair?
Robert, I'll encourage you to read Gerd Gigerenzer's excellent book, "How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms".
Offers a very astute perspective on the differences between crystallised and fluid intelligence.