The Mind of AI
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
B.F. Skinner (psychologist, 1960s, on automation and memory)
We know we have five physical senses of the body: Sight, smell, hear, taste, touch and feel.
But what of the senses of our mind and the senses of our spirit?
I was often confused as to what my mind was. The psyche. The soul.
Later, one of my mentors outlined that the mind consisted of six major faculties.
Memory
Reason
Perception
Imagination
Intuition
Will
He said that if we focused on each of these and developed them, we would have very powerful minds. I have been focusing a lot of my time on these six faculties of the mind and also on what I deem as the seven faculties of the spirit.
Humans have dominated the world of nature due to our powerful minds and powerful spirits, but now we have developeda technology that is surpassing us in each of these faculties one by one and by great leaps and bounds.
We call this AI. And AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, is an intelligence that surpasses us in all of these faculties in all categories and in all subjects. Many believe this is not a question of if, but of when.
AI has already surpassed us in memory, is quickly advancing in reasoning and perception and excelling in quantum leaps in imagination and creativity. Its intuition is much weaker, and its will is still bound by human programming and guardrails. Many are concerned that it will eventually develop its own will and determine a dystopian future, using all its destructive capabilities to rid the world of humanity's malicious and fallible intent.
The End Has Already Been Prophesied
The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
Stephen Hawking (2014)
Since 2000, I have been pondering when this age of AI would come as I watched the internet boom and bust and left my medical profession to focus on becoming an Internet entrepreneur. I spent the past 25 years watching the Internet, mobile and blockchain (crypto/Bitcoin) revolutions form and burgeon. With the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, I knew the time had come for AI to take off.
In 2007, I placed a $6 million bet on semantic search, but it was much too early. We were trying to teach computers to 'understand' meaning, not just match keywords and allow people to program visually without code. The vision was right, but the timing was too early, as the computing power was too small, slow, and too expensive.
In 2016, I decided to give AI another try, this time in the form of a mobile piano teaching app. It could perceive your notes, reason about mistakes, and turn the pages of the music as you played, highlighting each piano note as it heard. Still, it was a little too early again. One of our interns, Aidan Gomez, is now CEO of Cohere, a company valued at $6.8 billion.
In 2018, I asked myself, which companies would be central to the development of AI? What microchip company? Intel, ARM, AMD, Nvidia? I knew that the AI revolution would be powered not just by ideas, but by computational power. In other words, microchips and AI software, followed by AI hardware, such as robots, vehicles, appliances, and consumer products. I decided it would most likely be NVIDIA due to their GPUs (graphic processing units), which were already big in gaming and mining, the most popular application being blockchain crypto Ethereum, and were being used by AI, such as OpenAI, which would debut ChatGPT just four years later in 2022. I sold 80% of my Google stock, which had grown in value after I placed a $10,000 bet on NVIDIA in 2006. This investment, which had 20x'd in 12 years, was now reinvested in NVIDIA, yielding a 30x return in just 7 years. So, my $10,000 in 2006 has grown 600 times in 19 years, to roughly $6 million. It was more about placing a bet on my first principle thinking in investments than about my desire to make a lot of money.
In 2024, I founded How.com with my co-founder Aytunc Ozturk. I owned all these valuable domains and had many friends who owned valuable domains, but these assets were sitting idle on pay-per-click advertising pages. It was like seeing waterfront properties with nothing but little sheds on them. We prototyped one of my domains How.com, with AI and I invited 100 of my friends to invest in it. 80% were on board, and we raised $8M with $2M in warrants. We then entered into deals with our domain investors to prototype and develop their most valuable domain properties using our AI infrastructure. This resulted in the development of Email.com, Face.com, Songs.com, Notebook.com, and Queen.com. We are creating an AI ecosystem, a network community of skyscraper intelligence on the prime real estate of the Internet.
How did I know about AI 25 years ago?
I'm an avid reader of the Bible and in the book of Daniel and Revelation, it speaks of the coming end of the world, even though it was written thousands of years ago. I knew that there would be digital currency aka blockchain = crypto currency. But blockchain is also a platform upon which trusted secure transactions can be built upon. And the concept of an image speaking alluding to AI is prominent as well, where souls are bought and sold.
“Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.”
Revelation 13:16–17
The Exponential Growth of AI
Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to the Singularity.
Ray Kurzweil (futurist, author of The Singularity is Near)
When you build a house or a product, it's said that you can't have high quality, speed, and low cost. You have to choose two, but you must sacrifice one of them. However, with AI, quality and speed are increasing exponentially, while costs are declining profoundly.
Compute power: doubling every five months or 4x per year. This means it will be 1024x in five years from now.
Costs have fallen 280x in two years. Hardware costs are declining at a rate of 30% annually, and efficiency is increasing by 40%. The rise of competition and the race to achieve AGI by companies and countries has led to massive investments and intense competition, resulting in competitive pricing.
Quality: Benchmark leaps are staggering. Coding, reasoning and multimodal scores double or triple in a year. The neural network is akin to a massive brain, with information being fed into it and its capabilities massively expanding with computing power as the industry grows and competes. It's demanded by the global populations and companies feed it endlessly and develop it.
Over the next five years, the exponential growth of AI will transform every industry, company, person, occupation, and the way we learn and do things. Most digital workflows will be AI-augmented or replaced by AI. In ten years, intelligent agents will run entire business units autonomously, as well as autonomous machines like vehicles, robots and devices.
Jobs: Destruction vs Creation
AI is creative destruction. It will transform industries, countries and people.
Displacement: Knowledge industries, clerical, routine and entry-level analytical roles are most vulnerable.
Creation: new fields of AI trainers, data curators, robotics engineers and human-AI managers.
By 2030, estimates show that +170 million jobs will be created versus -92 million jobs lost, resulting in a more productive workforce.
The danger is not job loss, but falling behind without reskilling and failing to leverage AI to enhance research and productivity.
I leverage AI a lot. I find that I need to think more to assign tasks to AI on my behalf, and then I can have a conversation with it to discern what is true, possible, or false.
The World Transformed
AI is the new electricity.
Andrew Ng (Google Brain, Coursera, Baidu)
Tesla touts that robots will be the most significant industry. Greater than the iPhone, which catapulted Apple to the #2 company behind NVIDIA. Tesla is a trillion-dollar company right now. It could be worth $10 trillion or more in the next ten years if it takes a lion's share of the robot industry. First deployed in industry, companies, and personal households. They will have AI inside, and this AI is like a nervous system that powers the hardware to be stronger, faster, and cheaper - again, the three levers that make it exponential and useful to the world and people. As more mass-scale developments occur, such as with the automobile and the mobile phone, costs decrease, allowing every household to own one or two, or even a handful, just as we have with cars. 100 years ago, only the wealthy could afford a car, but Ford democratized that. Tesla democratized the electric vehicle. They aim to create and democratize the robot.
Autonomous vehicles will transform transportation and logistics, along with shipping, just as Uber did, but on a much grander scale. Waymo, run by Google, logs 250,000 paid driverless rides per week. Baidu's Apollo Go did 2.2 million driverless rides last quarter.
ChatGPT had 1 million users in 5 days after it was launched in November 2022. Today, it has 700 million weekly active users. It is the #1 app worldwide. It's only a matter of time; it has 1 billion daily active users, and then 2B and growing.
There are its competitors who are trying to follow quickly. Google's Gemini, whose engine is quite good, and which Elon Musk predicts will most likely win in AI. Anthropic by Claude and backed by Amazon, Microsoft, which owns a good stake in OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. Meta. And of course, Elon Musk's xAI, who is the most brilliant of our age. He built a 100,000 AI server farm in 19 days. This typically takes 3 to 5 years. The CEO of NVIDIA, Jensson Huang, says this is impossible and that only one person on our planet could do something like this. He has two other AI companies: Tesla, which is an AI car company, and SpaceX, where its rockets utilize AI.
But the real cold war of our time is which country will build the AI that everyone uses. US or China? In China, Alibaba, Deepseek, Baidu, and Bytedance (the owner of TikTok) are all vying to catch up, and they are moving quickly. The US has been trying to slow them down by not allowing them to buy the best AI chips from NVIDIA, but they are resourceful and, with slightly slower AI chips and with much lesser costs, they are innovative and leaping forward despite these speedbumps.
The world will become like the world of The Jetsons in due time.
How You can Leverage AI
We must develop AI with a sense of humility, knowing it can uncover patterns invisible to us, yet also mislead us if we treat it as omniscient.
Fei-Fei Li (Stanford, pioneer of computer vision)
Imagine what it would be like when AGI becomes accessible, and you have access to it. It will be more intelligent than all the world's combined doctors, lawyers, accountants, business consultants, psychologists, counsellors, and so on. How will you leverage this access?
Now (next 6 months):
Automate your tasks: research, organization, clerical and administrative tasks, translations, consultations.
Automate your front office: leverage AI for efficient intake, onboarding, and customer support.
Accelerate creative production: writing, ideation, production, such as writing drafts, proposals, transforming your business, ads, videos, and landing pages at 10x speed
Capture your proprietary data: this becomes your moat
Next (6-24 months):
Build AI-native product features for yourself or your company using AI, as it can now code, design, and market, and is improving rapidly.
Pilot physical autonomy (logistics, mobility)
Reskill yourself and your team from task-doers to AI supervisors of AI agents/apps.
Later (2-5 years):
Run multi-agent workflows as "AI departments"
Leverage edge AI everywhere that is latency-free, private, and on-device)
Establish governance as AGI levels emerge
Reflection
As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore.
John McCarthy (Father of AI, coined the term “Artificial Intelligence,” 1956)
I've been investing in AI for nearly two decades- sometimes too early, sometimes just right. AI is now mastering the six senses of the mind. The question is no longer if, but when.
The winners will be those who leverage AI and act early, build moats and reskill quickly.
And the true gift is that leveraging AI will enhance your and your team's productivity 10x, 100x, or more. This time can be used to develop your own faculties of the mind, such as memorizing, reasoning, perceiving, imagining, intuiting, and developing your own will.
And also to focus on the seven faculties of the spirit that are the source of a person's being and power, and focus on the long-term, purpose, meaning and love.
Life-Changing Question
Circumstances and events are the outward expressions of inward thoughts and aspirations.
James Allen - The Mastery of Destiny, 1909
With AGI approaching,
Am I using AI to amplify my humanity - or am I letting it replace it by relegating the faculties of my mind without thought to AI?
That one question reframes everything:
Memory: Am I outsourcing my memory to machines, or using AI to remember better and free my mind for wisdom?
Perception: Am I letting algorithms shape what I see, or am I leveraging AI to perceive hidden patterns and truth?
Reason: Am I trusting AI to think for me, or partnering with it to expand my reasoning?
Imagination: Am I passively consuming AI creations, or using it to multiply my creative reach?
Intuition: Am I dulling my own instincts, or sharpening them with AI as a second lens?
Will: Am I surrendering autonomy to machines, or directing AI with human purpose and conviction?
Next week—
My Remarkable Heart Disease Results in Just 3 Months
How I went from a vascular age worse than a 85 year old to a normal 55 year old in just three months
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
