Beginnings

On August 18 2025 I visited Rich Sutton in Edmonton. We have known each other for about a decade. We have never worked together on anything. But he is my go-to person for learning about AI things. In addition to being one of the most clear-thinking people I’ve ever met, he is also a great guy. When I started my AI journey long ago I was not part of that community. But he always made me feel welcome. He has always been very patient with explaining technical things, and why he thinks about AI in the way he does.

We discussed what was going on in the world. He told me one of his former students, David Silver, was thinking about how to fully embrace learning from experience. This could lead to a fundamental understanding of what intelligence was that would apply to all agents, from viruses to people to robots to software systems. It is arguably the only principled path to understanding and building superintelligence.

I’d never met Dave. (If you've followed the Tangled project you know I have been a long-time admirer and re-implementer of his work). We had a couple of introductory calls to discuss, and decided that it would be cool to get together. I flew to the UK and we hung out for a while. He described his vision for building superintelligence. I was, to put it mildly, intrigued. So I moved to London for a few months. We worked together on setting up a new company, called Ineffable Intelligence. After the company launched on January 16 2026, he began gathering a team of the best people in the world, and raised enough capital to make a major dent in the problems on the way to mission success.

(Aside: The quality of the people in London is very impressive. Usually when you hear about some place competing with the Bay Area it is eyeroll inducing. But London has a real chance of being where superintelligence emerges. Interesting to think about how that might change the world...)

The people Dave has assembled – investors, engineers, scientists, support, legal – are extraordinary. They are highly creative and productive. Many of these folks are the best possible person for the role they are playing anywhere in the world.

For the few months I was there, I was the least technically competent person in the room. This was humbling. But it was also a truly amazing experience. There are levels to technical and scientific capability. Being able to see the Michael Jordans of AI do their thing was something else.

I did however have an idea about one area where I might be able to contribute — the intersection of superintelligence and fundamental physics. I had already begun thinking about this during the Tangled project. The way a superintelligent civilization would learn to do (and define) physics isn’t necessarily the same as how we do it. They might learn different things, and use different methods to do so. It seems like a very rich area to think about.

I thought long and hard about staying at Ineffable full time. But in the end my commitment to finishing the walk across Canada took precedence. There were two main reasons. The first is that it would be difficult for me to contribute technically given the caliber of people at Ineffable, at least in the company's early stages. The second is that I'm getting older (will turn 55 soon) and being able to do 20+ kilometers a day on two lane highways filled with 18 wheelers cosplaying Death Race 2000 has a fuse.

But I do like to think about things, even if it is mostly to try to understand them myself. To this end, I’ve begun actively working on and thinking about what civilizations of superintelligent physicists might look like. I am calling the scaffolding around these ideas The Superphysicist Project. By its nature this is curiosity-driven basic research. At this point, it lacks clear objectives, milestones, or commercial focus.

For now it is just me, thinking and writing about different concepts in this general space, poking around, embarrassing myself with public displays of not understanding things, and trying via explaining to get some insight into some difficult topics.

If you are fascinated by things like the nature of spacetime, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, agency, consciousness and first-person experience, what intelligence actually is, and associated topics, and you want substance over flash, you are my audience.

Superintelligence is right around the corner. While I am biased, I think understanding the fundamental nature of our Universe is the most exciting potential outcome of this.